Fired After 13 Years

Imagine after 13 years of flying commercial airliners around the world, living out your lifelong passion for flying, all the hours of studying that you needed, reviewing all the systems of the planes, the procedures, all the sacrifices that both you and your family had of missing holidays and special events because they were out flying for your airline. the hours of your life in the simulator running through the multiple hypothetical scenarios which we encounter in order to be proficient and safely handle the various situations that could show up like smoke on the flight deck or an engine failure or medical emergencies in the middle of flight and you get fired. You're sitting on the flight deck on your aircraft getting ready to go and two guys walk up and you know they're there to fire you. That's what happened. Your plane is loaded. Passengers are on board. Jet is fueled up. Flight plan's been filed. Your clearance has been given to you. All the bags have been loaded. And you're sitting on the ramp in Amsterdam finishing the last little bits of paperwork. And two local Dutch police officers walk up to you and they ask you the question that you've been dreading hearing for the last 13 years. Captain, can we see your license, please? Your heart sinks because this is the Dutch police. This isn't the local Dutch aviation authority. It's common as a pilot when we're out flying different places of the world. The local authority that handles aviation there will show up to your aircraft and they'll ask you for your license, your medical, possibly your radio operator's permit. They'll want to see that all your documents that are required by your airline in order to fly are up to date. They'll want to verify that you have all the pertinent information or all the pertinent things that are required from you. It's like a different check that they'll do for you. Sometimes you know it's coming, sometimes you don't know it's coming, but they'll show up on your aircraft and they'll ask you for those things. But those people when they show up, they have a different type of ID. It's not the police department, it's the local aviation authority. In the US, when the FAA does this, we call it a ramp check. I don't know where they call it in other places in the world, but in the USA, we call it a ramp check. Pretty common, but it's not done by the local police. And since it's a police standing there and you know what you've been doing, you likely know this is going to be the end of your flying career. The police are there because they know your secret that you've been scared would come out for the last 13 years. That's exactly what happened to this pilot, Thomas Solom. Thomas was born in Sweden. He grew up, like a lot of people, obsessed with airplanes and loved flying. His father often used to take him to the airport and do plane spotting, which a lot of you have done. And if you're that interested in aviation where you're going to go spend hours sitting there next to the runway to take pictures or videos of planes coming in, you've looked to see the cost of going to flight school. It's pretty expensive. To earn money, Thomas went out and started doing work around aircraft. That's what anybody who loves aircraft would do. And he ended up doing maintenance for SAS, which is the flag carrier for Scandinavia. And don't worry, Americans. Scandinavia isn't one particular country. It's a little trick they try to play on us in Europe. But don't worry, I got you covered. Scandinavia technically is comprised of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, which are these countries right here. And the flag carrier of these three countries is SAS. In the US, we don't have a flag carrier, but typically it's a airline that sometimes owned by the actual government, and they get preferential rights, and they're kind of the main airline for that country. Most countries have a flag carrier because in the US, we have so many different airlines, there's not a one flag carrier that like what you have in a lot of other countries. But in Scandinavia, it's SAS. And while working there at SAS, he started to make connections and network. And in doing so, he became friends with somebody that was involved in the simulator training program. For pilots, since we fly for a living, these typically are the last place we want to go. That's because it's typically a high source of stress for us. It's where we're tested. It's where we're evaluated. And yet, every time I post a video going into a simulator, people are like, "Oh, that looks so cool. That must be so much fun. " into a pilot that's normally flying the line. That's the last place that you're wanting to be because there's just a lot of stress. It's like hours of just chaos that's going on and so it's stressful. I'm not a huge fan of it, but it is a requirement and I understand the purpose for it. I don't have a problem doing it, but it's not like, oh man, I just can't wait to get in there. But if you loved flying and never had the opportunity to do it, I could teach you 90% of everything that you need in order to get in there and safely fly that aircraft over the next 18 months. Thomas would spend hours studying the systems of the plane and secretly sneaking in sim sessions for two to three hours. During those sim sessions, he would practice engine failures on takeoff, which we call a V1 cut. He would practice emergency descent checklist usage, flying, all the different profiles that we have to do, crosswind landings. And I think it's fair to mention at this point in his life, after the four minutes of research that I did on it, it said that he had his private pilot license. So, he already had the basics. He had already done some landings. He had some basic

radio skills because you don't get those in the simulator. Even though they do simulated, it's not the same as real world listening to a bunch of different noise in the background. It's not that intense. So, he already had that training to be a private pilot, which typically is it took me about 40 hours. So, 40 maybe 45 is the norm. and you get that license and you basically have the ability to land a small plane, usually a small single engine aircraft is something like what I learned to fly in, you have the ability to safely get that plane on the ground. And with those basic skills, I could take any of you watching this, if you had that basic private pilot thing and you give me 18 months of hanging out with me and a simulator at our disposal, I guarantee you I can teach you to pass a 747 check ride. Are you going to be a great pilot? No. But could I get you competent enough to safely fly that simulator and do all the different maneuvers that you need to do and handle everything to safely get that plane on the ground and pass all the different checks? 100% 18 months easily. But he was doing it all on his own and secretly. Nobody knew except him what he was planning to do. Taking a play from the Frank Abagnail playbook, Thomas forged a commercial pilot's license in 1997 at his kitchen table and created a completely fake ID number. And since in Europe there's a bunch of different countries, when you have it from one country and you take it to another, for the Americans, they'd say it's the equivalent of having a driver's license. I'm in Texas. I got a Texas driver's license and I take that over to Michigan. Things aren't in the right normal place that you're used to seeing. Things will be different fonts. you don't really know what it should look like. So, you have a Texas license and you're in Michigan, it's kind of the same. If you have a Scandinavian or a Swedish license and you took it to another place like Italy, they don't really know what it should look like unless they often see one. Well, the people over at Aladdin Airlines ended up hiring him to fly their 737s. And if you're thinking 1997, there was an airline called Aladdin Airlines. I was thinking the exact same thing too as I started researching it cuz I thought that's a really strange name for an airline because that's when that movie came out. I was a little off with my dates, but 5 years earlier in 1992, Aladdin had been the most successful, highest grossing animated film that had ever crossed $500 million. You would think that if you worked in aviation or had children that you would have heard of this Aladdin Airlines and thought, "Oh, wow. Okay, interesting. That's weird. I didn't know about that airline. That would be like if in today's world I started an airline called Avengers Airline or uh Star Trek Airlines or Star Wars Airlines. It would be like the equivalent of that in 1997. Aladdin Airlines never existed. He just made it up and came up with that is the name, which I have to say is a bit questionable. I would have taken something that maybe seemed more realistic than Aladdin Airlines, but who am I to judge? Well, the people in the HR department at Air1, they did believe that there was an Aladdin Airlines that had, I guess, gone out of business because they offered him a job. And to clarify, the Air1 that I'm referring to in this video is not the current Air1 that's flying out of the UK, which I actually recently saw. It's this Air1, which was the Italian edition. And just like that, with the fake license that he made at his kitchen table, 18 months of self-driven preparation, and the worst invented name of a fake airline I could possibly think of, Thomas was hired as a first officer on the 737. Now, something that I don't know, but I'm assuming is the case, is that the simulators that he was training on at SAS were the 737s, which would have made his training go extremely well. Because a lot of times when you show up at an airline, you've never flown that aircraft before. you don't know all the systems. If he'd spent 18 months reading all the manuals and studying all the system logic and spending hours and hours in the sim, he would have showed up for training being super prepared, which means that even though he lacked a lot of the experience that some of these other pilots had, he would have been very familiar with the systems that aircraft because you have oral exams and sometimes written exams and simulator exams and having spent 18 months preparing for all that is a lot. Normally you will get either no time or a week of preparation or maybe two weeks of preparation when you find out your aircraft to start studying the systems. But he had a year and a half. So he was able to bridge that gap from his lack of knowledge from not having the years of experience that he said he did. And then he was able to show up and if you show up and you're very competent in the simulator, you know the systems really well, which is what the instructors would expect because if they were looking at your resume, which like when I went through training on the 747, they had your resume so they could see all the different experience that you had. So, if he's saying he worked at Aladdin Air or Airways or whatever he had called

it, and he's saying he was flying a 737 for them, which I'm guessing is what he said, they would go, "Oh, okay. " So, they would expect him to be very competent. And because he loved aviation and was really into airplanes, he would have been very competent in there and there would have been no red flag. So, kind of smart. Now, after all the stresses of passing the initial training, which would have been for me super stressful, showing up every day thinking this is going to be the day that I'm going to get caught, he passed training. And daily life as a pilot is actually pretty simple. As a first officer, he would have gotten on the job training on actually flying the aircraft in real life. He would have showed up to work every day, learned how to do all the walkarounds, and done all that different on the job training of how that airline wants you to do things. And that's important to note. Different airlines have different flows and call outs and procedures and things that they want you to do differently. So, it'd be okay if you were saying like, "Hey, how exactly do you want me to do this? " Because at your old airline, it may be a totally different procedure that they want you to do. Every airline, same aircraft will have sometimes a almost opposite who does what responsibilities. So, him being a little bit behind would have been normal and he would have said, "Oh yeah, over at Aladdin, this is how we did it. " and that would be the end of it. Meanwhile, nobody's catching on to this Aladdin Airways or Aladdin Airlines that doesn't even ever exist. Now, he's flying to all the cool places. He's going to Rome. He's going to Paris. He's going to Madrid. Maybe even Scandinavia, which we all know where that is now. And after 3 years of doing his job well, his seniority allowed him the opportunity to train and upgrade to captain. Now, how it works now, and I wasn't a pilot in the 90s, but how it works now is that every time I go in for simulator training, I have to bring them my ID, my medical, my radio operation permit, all the stuff that I'm required to have with me when I'm flying, I have to bring that in there and I have to show it to them. And there's people that know who I am, but yet they have to take that and they have to write it down. Now, at this time, I don't know if that was the case, but every time he has to present his license, at least that's how it is now. I'm assuming that there was some version of this at that time, but that means everybody would have looked at it and gone, this weird Swedish license, if you didn't look at them all the time, you would never really catches a, "Hey, this seems weird or different from all the other ones. " So, he just kept going. Nobody was saying anything. So, like in simulator world, when you're out flying in the simulator and you start messing something up, the one of the things they always tell you is unless the instructor says stop, you just keep flying because it means it's not bad enough. Even though as a pilot, typically you have an A type personality and you want to stop what you're doing. You're like, I didn't do that perfect. I'm going to go do it again. They always tell you if you mess it up, unless the instructor stops the simulator, just keep going and just let that go behind you. So, I'm guessing that's the strategy that he had here with his license. He said, "Well, no one's saying that I need to stop, so I'm just going to keep going. " He shows up for his simulator training and he passes. Having successfully worked at that airline, he now upgrades to Captain. And using that as leverage, he was able to then navigate to multiple other airlines throughout Europe, including Jet 2, which was a British carrier, and Coridon Airlines, which was a Turkish version of Ryan Air, or for us Americans, Spirit. It's a lowbudget carrier. having that previous background where the airlines can call and say, "Hey, uh, did so and so work over there? " Yep, he did. Great. However, what happened to Aladdin? Well, I'll tell you from experience because I worked at an airline that ended up closing its doors. When you fill out your resume, if if Aladdin Air ended up closing, you'd say, "Oh, yeah, they ended up closing. " There's no way to pull records. The business is defunct. It's gone, right? So, I have an airline that I worked for that doesn't exist anymore. So, I write down that I worked at this place and that they're closed. So, I don't really know how the airlines would check and verify that. So, it's possible that he said, "Oh, yeah, I worked there. " And then they ended up closing and that was the end of it. Guessing that's how he got away with it. But now having actual work experience at an airline where that carrier can call and verify, oh, he worked there. He passed training. How did he do? Like in the US, we're able to ask for training records of previous air carriers that you worked at. So, you can see, oh, he passed all of his training and everything went well. Now he looks super legitimate. Even with his somewhat sketchy handmade license that he's doing, he looks legitimate to these new airlines. So a British carrier took him and the Turkish carrier took him. And so that leads to where he got caught. March 2nd, 2010. Thomas is sitting on the flight deck of a 737 at Amsterdam Shipole Airport with 101 passengers on board when for some reason someone in the Swedish authorities tipped off the Dutch police about some irregularities with his paperwork and his license, which is strange to me because I don't know why anybody would have been able to correlate those two things. My guess is he had said something to somebody and they tipped the Swedish police off which

then led to the Dutch thing. But that would be my guess because this would have happened in some type of a short time, right? Like he's there on a trip. He's not at his base in Turkey. He's out on a trip. So somehow somebody found something out and I'm guessing called the Swedish police which then called the Dutch police uh or didn't call the airline which then said called the Dutch police and said, "Hey, go get this guy. " I'm guessing is what happened. It's kind of strange to be honest with you how this whole thing played out. But as soon as the two police officers came on the plane and started asking for his documents and he recognized that they were police and not the aviation authority, he knew the gig was up. And according to report right there on the ramp, he confessed to the police, I've flown for the last 13 years without a license. That is one of the most craziest stories of aviation fraud I've ever heard of. 13 years flying, including time being as a captain for multiple different airlines, going around Europe and possibly the world. And you made it 13 years on a completely fake document that you made at your kitchen table. So what happened to him? Jail, huge fines, lifetime ban on snacks? Nope. According to that, there was no prison time. He lost the right to fly for 12 months, not even a lifetime ban. He had to pay a fine of €2,000, which is less than $3,000. And the judge determined that he had never endangered anyone in the air, so they barely punish him. Obviously going tough on crime isn't the way this judge likes to handle things and sure that's going to work out great in Holland long term. Despite the only 12-mon suspicion, I thought that Thomas would go back to flying and just get his commercial license, which seems like it would have been a really easy thing for him to do with all this experience. But he actually never returned to flying. And after stating publicly that he never intended to return to aviation, he ended up continuing his father's legacy who had a career in photography. And Thomas went on to start working with some of the best soccer clubs throughout Europe. And while I couldn't find the actual source document or video of him actually saying it, according to the reports and research that I found, when asked about the fraud that he committed in order to do this, he said acknowledging that the actions that he did were immoral. The systemic barriers like training cost and limited resources and opportunity is what drove him to make those choices of committing fraud for 13 years. Sure sounds like someone who took responsibility for their actions to me. I look forward to hearing from you. Until then, keep the blue side up.