Posted on 05/17/2010 10:58:56 AM PDT by mgstarr
This is Thomas Salme, a maintenance engineer who became a Boeing 737 pilot by flying a few nights in a flight simulator and printing a fake airliner pilot license. Amazingly enough, he flew passengers for thirteen years without any incidents.
Thirteen years of back and forth from Sweden to everywhere else in Europe. Nobody noticed until a couple of months ago, when Salme was caught by the police as he was getting ready for take off. He was in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, with 101 passengers at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. He admits that it was all a crazy idea:
"I got the crackpot idea to apply as a co-pilot at a real airline so I made myself a Swedish flying permit with a logo out of regular white paper. It wasn't laminated, and looked like something I'd made at home. It was surprisingly easy. The documents look different everywhere in Europe. An Italian airline doesn't know what a Swedish licence looks like. And you can forge all the IDs you need. I'd train there for two or three hours at a time—at least 15 to 20 times over one and a half years."
Despite putting the lives of thousands at risk, Salme only got fined a couple thousand dollars and was banned from flying for a year. Thinking twice about it, it's kind of reasonable. Despite being crazy enough to pull such a stunt, it's not entirely his fault. After all, how can a company and the flight agencies involved be so absolutely inept? How can they accept a simple printout and put a random guy in the cockpit of a passenger plane without running any background checks? A simple Google search would have probably turned out enough information to stop this from the beginning. I can imagine Frank Abagnale Jr. pulling this stunt in the 60s, but now? There are no excuses.
If anyone needs to be nailed, that's the useless authorities that make us follow all kinds of stupid security procedures to get into an airplane, but can miserably fail to check the identity and qualification of the pilots flying the plane
That’s ok we have a guy flying a country without id....
Maybe Northwest should hire him. Wasn’t Northwest the airline with the drunken pilots?
Did he also stay at a Holiday Inn?
“Catch Me If You Can”
"PAPERS PLEASE!" < /nazi accent > < /sarc >
I would say his flight record speaks for itself.
He effectively proves it is not as difficult as some would have you believe. I think the hard part is getting through the checklist, flight after flight, day after day, year after year.
There’s no such thing as an illegal pilot, he was just flying the planes that...
No big deal...we’ve people Presidentin’ right here in the USA...without any ID at all!!
If only fake pilots were allowed to marry, this never would have happened.
Did that guy ever actually fly the plane, or did he just pretend to be a dead-header everywhere he went? I don't know.
LOL.
He did it, for the children.
To his credit, he seems to have done a decent job of it, and was sincere in his efforts (i.e. he genuinely wanted to be a successful airline pilot). He’s probably a halfway decent pilot by now, which is more than I can say for some licensed commercial pilots I’ve had. It doesn’t excuse what he did, since the real training pilots get is more about what to do when things go wrong, than what to do when things go right. I’ve heard more than one pilot tell me that anyone can fly an airplane in level flight and clear conditions; the problem comes when trying to take off or land and/or fly in adverse weather.
The prosecutors need to wrap up this case and let him get back to doing his job of flying the planes for the people...
Line O the year!
According to Wikipedia (for what that’s worth), he never actually flew; even though other pilots asked him to take the controls, he always begged off, using the “eight hours between bottle and throttle” excuse.
How many Islamists are working on the same thing?
How does he pass the recurrent training? He is either very bright and a very quick study, or the training is garbage.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.