I firmly believe in reincarnation / past lives. Still, I am skeptical of the story you report on here because of the reliance on the similar bone structure and name gimics. There are other reasons that young James could have these perceptions of memories. For example, perhaps the pilot's soul is trying to through him?

So how do I know that past lives are real? Well, I know that this is my 17,043rd human incarnation, https://medium.com/about-me-stories/my-journey-spiritual-and-otherwise-9d5f6aca18ee which sounded like a lot to me when I first was granted this knowledge about 2 years ago but I now realize it is probably run-of-the-mill and not even close to the vast amount of incarnations that souls on the archangel/ascended master/messenger path experience and endure. https://medium.com/illumination-curated/life-is-school-for-the-soul-9b081dbe8453

When I told a friend of mine the other day the 17,043 number his first and quite intelligent skeptical question was have there even been that many generations in human history? I got passed my own struggles with over 17k lives in the 200k or so human history by deciding that each incarnation can be its own alternate reality. https://medium.com/my-unpopular-opinion/no-physicist-has-yet-to-understand-the-concept-of-time-be3b33506ea6