He is a fairly skilled parachutist and was wearing a skydiving rig. He also knew where he was putting his plane down.

So he might have got to it.

But on the other hand he's also an idiot.

Nevertheless he at least thought he might have to do this.

One of the things I was most impressed by was how he managed to aim for some camera worthy bushes to land in when there were SO many better options for safety.

I wasted an inordinate amount of time analysing the whole thing myself, including but not limited to finding the location based on geographic features - and then testing in Flight Simulator.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.

I'm disappointed he's not thrown in jail for reckless endangerment.

> I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.

There was for a time a micro-industry of people taking flights to this location on Youtube -- it's one of the most fun examples of this that I've seen.

And yeah; really quickly people discovered that he genuinely had options.

There is a question I've not seen answered yet. Did the wallet guys know he was doing this in advance?

Unlikely. What most YouTubers call "sponsors" they have instead signed up to be an affiliate for using an online form. He likely broke the conditions for which the affiliate link/code could be used, which could have been the reason he removed that section from the video.

He also removed the ending, and both the beginning and ending were the pretext for the flight – bringing his friends ashes in a used sandwich bag to be scattered in the mountains, so could have instead been removed to reduce the cheese factor.

I’ve seen speculation that he shot those “plane spiraling below me” money shots separately. Sadly I don’t have the time to find the YouTuber’s videos who made the claim.

…suffice to say lots of people have gone through his video frame by frame to find weird stuff.

Well, sure, that's where the lack of critical thinking skills comes in.

Though, de'd still probably get there before it spread to miles and miles...he just wouldn't have had much impact when he did even if it was only a few dozen yards in size.

The first thing he did after landing was head to the crash site. Not saying he could have actually stopped a forest blaze with fire extinguishers (it's not like wildland firefighters use them) but that might have been what he had planned.