I have to ask, what were your honest expectations from the original video posting. Did you have any clue what you were getting yourself into, and was it a simple prank intended to just fool a few of your "close" friends or the wider net.
Very good question.We had already been told by the captain he was going to dump most of the fuel and not to worry when we saw big sprays of airline fuel coming out of the wings. He was very reassuring and professional, as were the entire crew. After about 10 minutes of watching the fuel being dumped, I realised this was something quite unusual, my seat was on the wing and the two seats next to me were empty. The guy behind me was filming it on his phone and I thought I should get a clip of this too, however my phone was in my coat, so I asked a steward if I could quickly get my coat from the above locker, since we were all under strict instructions to remain in our seats with our seat belts on ... he said yes if you're quick, so I retrieved my iPhone from my coat and turned it on, hoping it the fuel dump wouldn't stop before I managed to film it. By chance I had done some filming on my phone the previous week at a giant salt lake in the Andes and uploaded it to Facebook, which is how I learned Facebook only lets you upload a maximum of 90 seconds video footage, something I was unaware of, so I knew to make the clip of the fuel dump under 90 second. As it happens, I had plenty of time to get some footage, it takes quite a long time to offload a full tank of fuel from a 777.
So when the plane lands we are kept on board for several hours, since they were hoping they could fix it and be in the air again, but this was never going to happen. All passengers were taken by bus to a hotel about 20 minutes away, there was a Brazilian film crew filming us as we came out of the terminal.
It was really hot and stuffy in the hotel, I had a buffet meal and beer courtesy of British Airways and went through the clips to see which was the best one and then had a think as to how I should word it.
I posted it on Facebook as a prank to friends and then went to bed. Next morning when I woke up a few hundred people had shared it (Brazil is 4 hours ahead of UK), however, upon clicking refresh it was becoming apparent it was starting to go viral.
All the passengers were later put on the same plane to continue our journey and obviously no more internet access once I'm on board. So I read a bit more of my book (The Iluminatus Triology lol), watch a film and go to sleep. When I get back to the UK I think nearly 10k people had shared it and half a million people had viewed - the number was even greater by the time I got home to Devon. From then on there, I winged it, i.e., made it up as I was going along. I was getting all sorts of messages and questions in my inbox and lots of friendship requests from people I didn't know. My friend Stuart Wyatt thought it was hilarious and talked me into posting that I'd been detained by military police. Again people were taking this at face value without questioning it. I fooled the journalists [sic] at Neo Nettle who published the story of my made up detention at Heathrow Airport by British authorities as fact, however, at this point I was starting to get uncomfortable with the deception and was discussing with Stuart the best way to come clean. Conveniently, the guy from the David Icke radio station contacted me after seeing the BS article on Neo Nettle and asked if I would come on his show, which he said had 40,000 listeners, so Stuart talked me into agreeing to go on the show live, telling me this would be a perfect opportunity to fess up ... so that's what I did.