I think the problem is that he actually posted himself refering to what he was doing as “an impromptu airshow”. I suspect if he hadnt done that and had just flown the glider and even posted the vid but without the “airshow” tag nothing would have happened.
But hey, I think this last year really has shown that there is a distinctly larger than expected proportion of society that really cant stand to see others having fun and will willingly call “the authorities” to make themselves feel better…
The FAA are extremely inconsistent on who they go after on YouTube. They’ve gone after people who show nothing but professional and safe operations of a TBM, but then refuse to do anything about the notorious Jerry saying “we can’t take action on things seen on social media”. There have also been cases where the FAA went after skydive jump ship pilots (e.g. the skydivers riding the King Air). Since then, when skydivers are being mischievous, they always blank out the registration of the plane.
Britain is a nation of curtain twitchers, and there was one case that showed up in the late 90s where a guy would photo every plane which came over his house, work out the height above terrain based on the size of the plane in the photo and the length of the lens, and send the photo to the CAA with the workings for anyone calculated to be under 1500’ (the minimum altitude over a congested area in the UK at the time). I’m not sure if anyone got prosecuted (as it would have to be criminal, it would require “beyond reasonable doubt”, and a good lawyer could probably cast some doubt on the lens used, the enlargement process used, whether the photo had been cropped etc, especially when the “curtain twitcher” calculates 1450’).
This needs to be posted here.
alioth wrote:
Britain is a nation of curtain twitchers,
hahahaha, thanks for the laugh.
I didn’t want to say it, but it is true. And nowadays let’s remember that many people are on furlough or out of work, frustrated with the world, and with A LOT of free time in their hands that they need to fill somehow.
We had a case like this in Switzerland when a guy allegedly took off from an uncontrolled airfield in “thick fog”, which a bystander on that airfield filmed with his phone or something similar and sent the film to both the press and the FOCA. It rised hell in the yellow press and the FOCA started an investigation. What has come out of it I don’t know, but I am disgusted by the fellow who did it (unknown), as he a) must have been someone who had legal access to that airfield, that means someone within the pilot community and b) he went to both the press and the FOCA. While he may well claim that compulsory occurrence reporting as his motivation, that one does not include forwarding the stuff to the yellow press.
Dimme wrote:
This needs to be posted here.
My adjective to describe that is: SCARY. It is plain SCARY how it is in any idiot’s power to get an administrative procedure against you rolling and mess with your life like that. Best case scenario you lose time and sleep over it. Worst case scenario: it could very quickly escalate out of proportion.
I would have definitely lawyered-up. I believe no matter how innocent one is, one should NEVER talk to the authorities because one can ONLY incriminate himself further, even by accident or unknowingly.
My view is that it would be hard to bust someone for something they wrote on a forum – because you could just say you lied.
That’s unless the CAA can then go and dig up e.g. radar data… So if I infringed etc I would not write about it for a long time, and then leave no clue as to where and when.
But a video is going to be more incriminating.
Please remember this. We’ve had threads here which had to be cleaned up in a hurry, to protect the poster.
I’m actually quite often surprised that the American FAA does investigations for a lot of YouTube movies. For sure there are million times less videos available from European GA, that’s one of the reasons why I like to make a video so now and then, but I see still quite enough German stuff on YouTube which might be at least a little bit “illegal”, but it seems the CAA’s in Germany just don’t care. In my case, after someone reported me, the contact with the CAA was very calm and nice, even though I think it was nuts that they didn’t knew about the customs regulations. I also talked once with one of the most known German YouTube pilots about the CAA and his videos, but he didn’t had any real issues so far, even though there are enough “haters” how could possibly report him.
I’m actually quite often surprised that the American FAA does investigations for a lot of YouTube movies
I am not 
A large amount of traffic to an aviation forum is from the national CAA and related bodies e.g. ATC. A lot of these people have a lot of free time, and ATC get regular breaks, so they browse social media. Historically, a lot of forum mods were ATCOs, because they have regular breaks. They are very interested in any illegality, although the extent to which they act on anything seems to be hugely variable. For example they could have busted thousands of SR22 pilots flying without DME or ADF – very easy low hanging fruit.
However, we don’t actually know that the FAA found the video. Look how many people spend 99.7% of their waking hours watching YT videos. I reckon, quite possibly somebody saw it and told the FAA.
In the US, the FAA staff in their forums can be helpful though. I found a guy on a US forum who turned out to be an FSDO inspector and he helped me greatly with preparing a field approval for my SN3500 installation. I ended up with a totally gold plated paperwork package for that job I’ve never heard of such a thing happening here. Here, they just pop up, with sanctimonious comments, pretending to be pilots based in Jersey who sail a boat, and vanish the instant somebody asks them about sailing around Jersey 
Hum that’s obviously unfair, we’ve had helpful contributions from ATC regarding for example Paris airspace etc.
