Thomas Salme
Swedish aviator (born 1969)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Harry Salme (born 18 February 1969, in Stockholm)[1] was convicted of flying passenger jets without a commercial pilot's license. After working as a First Officer and Captain from 1997 to 2010 for several international airline companies, Salme was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010.
Thomas Salme | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 18, 1969 Stockholm, Sweden |
History
In 1997, Salme, who worked as a maintenance engineer for SAS,[2] and had never flown a large aircraft, applied to the Italian airline company Air One to be a co-pilot, using false papers and a forged ID number, and was hired.[3] He had learned to fly passenger jets using a flight simulator at Stockholm Arlanda Airport a friend gave him off-hours access to.[4][2][5]
In 1999, he was promoted to captain and kept on working for Air One until 2006. He then moved to the Turkish-owned airline company Corendon Airlines, where he worked as a Captain for a year before being offered a contract at the British airline Jet2. After only ten months he decided to go back to work for Corendon, where he regularly flew passenger jets for another two years.[6] Salme accumulated 10,000 hours in the air while flying without a valid commercial pilot's license.[4][7]
Salme was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010, while seated in the cockpit of a Corendon Boeing 737 carrying 101 passengers just a few minutes before take-off to Ankara, Turkey.[8] Officers, who were alerted by a tip from Swedish authorities, said the man had once had a private pilot license, but it had expired and it never qualified him for passenger flights. As a result, he was fined 2,000 Euros (£1,700 or $2,700) and was banned from flying for 12 months by a Dutch court, which rejected the prosecutor's request for a three-month suspended jail sentence.[4][9]
Speaking through his lawyer, Salme said he had no plans to fly again.[9] He wrote a book in Swedish about his experiences, En bluffpilots bekännelse ("Confessions of a Con Pilot"), published in 2012 by Norstedts förlag.[10][11][12]
In the analysis of The Times, Salme's employer "bore part of the blame" because of its "laissez-faire approach to background checks".[8] According to The Times and the South China Morning Post, this was one of a series of fake resume scandals as a result of which airlines and other employers tightened their vetting procedures concerning resume claims made by job applicants.[8][13] Corendon Airlines tightened its vetting procedures for hiring pilots in the wake of this scandal.[14]