A pilot who flew passenger planes for a 13 years with a forged pilots license has been fined €2,000 and banned from flying for a year.
Thomas Salme, 41, has been flying passenger planes for the last 13 years, despite the fact that he does not have the license required to do so. Though the Mr. Salme was once a qualified commercial pilot, he was never licensed to carry passengers and his pilot's license was expired when he began flying passengers 13 years ago. Salme accumulated 10,000 unlicensed hours in the air by flying with his expired license, which he had doctored.
The Sun reports that Mr. Salme was working as a maintenance engineer for SAS when a friend let him try the airline's full-scale flight simulator while it was not being used. Salme said he trained in the flight simulator for two to three hours at a time and claims he used it between 15 and 20 times in the space of a year and a half. Using this experience to pass a test-flight with Scandinavian airline, Air One, Salme said it was surprisingly easy to get the job.
"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 was a fantasy creation. It wasn't laminated and looked like something I'd made at home. It was surprisingly easy."
A big part of the reason why Salme was never caught was that these permits look different in every country.
"The documents look different everywhere in Europe. An Italian airline doesn't know what a Swedish license looks like. And you can forge all the IDs you need."
Salme was caught in April after a tip was sent to Dutch police. He was arrested on a Boeing 737 just as he was about to fly 101 passengers from Amsterdam Shiphol to Ankara in Turkey.
In an interview with Sky News, Salme said that despite feeling ashamed of his actions, passengers on his flights were never once at risk.
"The moral point of view is that I feel ashamed that I did lie but I didn't ever feel, not once, feel that I put passengers in an unsafe position," he said.
Source : Tomsguide
Thomas Salme, 41, has been flying passenger planes for the last 13 years, despite the fact that he does not have the license required to do so. Though the Mr. Salme was once a qualified commercial pilot, he was never licensed to carry passengers and his pilot's license was expired when he began flying passengers 13 years ago. Salme accumulated 10,000 unlicensed hours in the air by flying with his expired license, which he had doctored.
The Sun reports that Mr. Salme was working as a maintenance engineer for SAS when a friend let him try the airline's full-scale flight simulator while it was not being used. Salme said he trained in the flight simulator for two to three hours at a time and claims he used it between 15 and 20 times in the space of a year and a half. Using this experience to pass a test-flight with Scandinavian airline, Air One, Salme said it was surprisingly easy to get the job.
"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 was a fantasy creation. It wasn't laminated and looked like something I'd made at home. It was surprisingly easy."
A big part of the reason why Salme was never caught was that these permits look different in every country.
"The documents look different everywhere in Europe. An Italian airline doesn't know what a Swedish license looks like. And you can forge all the IDs you need."
Salme was caught in April after a tip was sent to Dutch police. He was arrested on a Boeing 737 just as he was about to fly 101 passengers from Amsterdam Shiphol to Ankara in Turkey.
In an interview with Sky News, Salme said that despite feeling ashamed of his actions, passengers on his flights were never once at risk.
"The moral point of view is that I feel ashamed that I did lie but I didn't ever feel, not once, feel that I put passengers in an unsafe position," he said.
Source : Tomsguide