A bit like "Catch me if you can"

stoneill

Pilot flying commercial flights on a fake licence for 13 years.

A Swedish pilot has been arrested by Dutch police at Amsterdam-Schiphol International Airport (AMS/EHAM) for flying commercial aircraft for 13 years with a fake licence.

The 41-year-old pilot was about to fly a Corendon Airlines Boeing 737 from Amsterdam, the Netherlands to Ankara-Esenboga Airport (ESB/LTAC), Turkey with 101 passengers on board when he was arrested. Dutch police were notified about the pilot by Swedish authorities.

Flight CAI202 was scheduled to leave Amsterdam at 23:30 on March 2 and departed 01:20 the same night after a relief pilot took over. The airplane involved was Boeing 737-4Q8 TC-TJC.

The pilot confessed he had been flying for 13 years on a false licence, accumulating at least 10,000 hours flying hours. The man did have a pilot’s licence, but it was no longer valid for passenger aircraft, so he had falsified it.
He had worked for airlines in Belgium, Great Britain and Italy. A lawyer for Corendon Airlines commented that the pilot had worked for the airline for the last two years and had “expertly misled the company with his false papers”.


http://news.aviation-safety.net/2010/03/03/thirteen-years-on-invalid-licence-swedish-pilot-arrested/

Plowman

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IrishB.ie

This happened last March. This is him and how he got on in court. Wonder what he's doing now.

xflyer

Plowman wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

I imagine he had already faked his ATPL in order to get a job by the time his real one expired. Thus any attempt to renew it would have outed him. The irony is that he appears to have been a good pilot.

This is really the tip of the iceberg, it's not just on internet forums where we find fake pilots. Pilots too with fake hours, fake ratings, fake exam results, fake experience. There are plenty of storied from Korea and India for example. It seems to be more common in the more dodgy countries but as we can see it can happen in Europe and America too.

Some get found out because they're flying is poor or they have an incident but you can be sure many of them are still flying around getting away with it.

Tabnabs

You'd have to wonder if he will be applying for a genuine licence after the twelve month ban has expired. By all accounts he'd pass!

roundymac

was watching Air Crash Investigations last night. The guy flying the Crossair flight while fully qualified turned out to be an accident waiting to happen. He had been in numerous incedents, including doing a sight seeing flight over Switzerland which ended up over Italy, it was only when the passengers spotted road signs were in Italian that he realised his mistake. He also accidently retracted the landing gear on a ATP which was written off. His final trick was to kill himself and 21 others. Like I say this guy was fully qualified, he was even a training captain at one stage.