It was a Short. It was about 15 seconds long. And the title was, let's be honest, a slight exaggeration.
I didn't crash a real DA42 Twinstar. I crashed one in a simulator. But the title didn't say that. And YouTube didn't care. It got over 10,000 views - yes 10000 views, which for a Short on a channel my size at the time was a genuinely surprising number.
The interesting thing about that video is what it taught me about titles. I'd posted plenty of simulator content before with accurate, descriptive titles. Nobody watched them. The moment I framed it as a crash, people clicked.
There's something about the word crash that does something to people. I've noticed it consistently across my channel. Use the word crash in a title or thumbnail and the numbers go up. Every time. It doesn't matter if it's a simulator, a bad landing, or a near miss. The word itself is a magnet. People are drawn to it in a way that's hard to explain and slightly uncomfortable to admit you're exploiting.
I think it taps into something genuinely human. We watch dashcam compilations. We slow down past accidents. We want to see things go wrong because it's dramatic, and because somewhere in the back of our minds we're asking ourselves what we would have done differently. Aviation crashes carry extra weight because the stakes feel absolute.
When I started making videos I was very deliberate about avoiding what felt like clickbait. Sensational titles, misleading thumbnails, promising drama that wasn't there. It felt cheap and I didn't want WAP to be that kind of channel. That instinct is still right, I think. But the reality of YouTube in 2026 is more nuanced than simply avoiding clickbait.
YouTube isn't really an art form anymore. It's a science. The platform rewards specific behaviours and punishes others, and the metrics tell you exactly what's happening. Hook rate in the first three seconds. Average view duration. Click through rate on the thumbnail. Retention graphs that show you the precise moment people stopped watching and why. You can obsess over all of it, and plenty of creators do.
The crash title worked not just because of the word itself, but because it created a question in the viewer's mind that they needed to answer. That's the hook. The retention came because the video was short enough that leaving felt pointless. The click through rate was high because the thumbnail backed up the title. Every element was doing a job, even if I didn't fully understand that at the time.
The line I try to walk is psychological without being dishonest. Create curiosity, deliver on the promise, respect the viewer's time. Whether I always get that balance right is another question entirely. Only you know the answer to that!!
