A Swedish pilot who flew commercial airliners for 13 years with a fake license said he never put passengers at risk. Thomas Salme was caught as he was about to pilot a Boeing 737 from Amsterdam to Turkey, arrested on suspicion of holding a fake pilot's license. He had accumulated 10,000 unlicensed hours in the air, admitting that he doctored his expired pilot’s license. He was fined $2,600 and banned from flying for a year. Judges in Amsterdam rejected the prosecution’s plea for a prison sentence, even praising Salme's safety record. The 41-year-old was working as a maintenance engineer for Scandinavian Airlines when a friend let him access the firm’s full-scale flight simulator while it wasn’t being used. “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,” confessed Salme. He is now being compared to Frank Abignale, the American who conned people into thinking he was a pilot. Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the film Catch Me If You Can that told his story.
