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.” added by: lordsbassman
