Jacko wrote:
an alleged rejected off-airport landing in the USA.
Even the pilot itself doesn’t claim this. From all we know from the video (and this already is the one sided presentation of the pilot) there was no intend at all to actually land in that case – therefore it is not a rejected landing.
The defense is not “I tried to land but aborted due to safety considerations” but rather “what I did could have been part of a normal landing so how can it be illegal if I do it without a landing?”. Btw. this is a very similar argument that he was using in defense of his waterskiing penalty for which he has been on probation. alioth wrote:
(2) he’s well known off YouTube in aviation circles, so just ripe to be “made an example of”
It absolutely looks like FAA has some special awareness for pilots who do stupid and/or illegal things to generate clicks on YouTube – including but not limited to big organizations like RedBull
