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 The man did have a pilot’s licence, but it was no longer valid for passenger aircraft, so he had falsified it.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”.