Fake SAA pilot flew under radar

ForceFate said:
Looks like this is the incident...

http://avherald.com/h?article=4c0504fb&opt=0
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Excellent! That matches the description, and indicates the type of scenario where an under-trained pilot might be out of his depth...

The article is somewhat confusing, so its very hard to know what actually happened.

According to information The Aviation Herald received the aircraft sustained multiple system faults in flight including the failures of Air Data Reference 2 (ADR2) and 3 (ADR3) associated with the autopilot and autothrust disengaging and the fall back of the FBW into alternate law.

The occurrence aircraft remained on the ground for 3 days, then returned to Johannesburg as flight SA-4263.
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Edit: Half-surprised that the incident wasn't in the media, but I guess SAA doesn't like adverse publicity. Now it has both!
 
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I just wanna get this right, they said he had won awards, and bonuses etc that SAA wants back along with his high salary as he was senior.

So he was unlicensed but BETTER AT FLYING than their new trained and licensed recruits... think about that :)
 
Not just in 3rd world countries, happened in Europe too: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...Thomas-Salme-flies-Air-One-jets-13-years.html

'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,' he told German magazine Focus.

'It wasn't laminated, and looked like something I'd made at home,' he said.

'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.'

He told the magazine that a friend who worked for Scandinavian airline SAS let him use their flight simulator at night.

At the time he was working for SAS as a maintenance engineer.
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Gordon_R said:
Excellent! That matches the description, and indicates the type of scenario where an under-trained pilot might be out of his depth...

The article is somewhat confusing, so its very hard to know what actually happened.



Edit: Half-surprised that the incident wasn't in the media, but I guess SAA doesn't like adverse publicity. Now it has both!
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Sounds like someone tried to conceal fact but (s)he was caught out and promptly suspended.
 
Don’t these guys have to have regular training, assessments and simulator time? You can’t just fake a document and fly an airliner with no further checks or evaluations for the next 20 years?
 
Moto Guzzi said:
Most accidents proved over time that the licence was not worth the paper its written on, so this will be interesting, Theory versus experience and practical feel....I wish the same stance can be taken in the financial world.
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If you allow this to happen, you open the industry to all sorts of dangers. He may be better than an average pilot with less than 5k hours behind controls, but his company has minimum standards to be adhered to.
 
garp said:
Don’t these guys have to have regular training, assessments and simulator time? You can’t just fake a document and fly an airliner with no further checks or evaluations for the next 20 years?
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Yes and he passed all those.

He's not a fake pilot as the headline suggests, he has a valid CPL license to fly airliners as required by the CAA. SAA has an additional requirement of a ATPL which is what is fake.
 
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ForceFate said:
If you allow this to happen, you open the industry to all sorts of dangers. He may be better than an average pilot with less than 5k hours behind controls, but his company has minimum standards to be adhered to.
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Yet the same airline allows pilots to fly in the same seat with no APTL for a period of 5yrs, at the end of the day they are still hauling your ass around at the lower standard...
 
Flight engineers were used on older planes where there was less automation and more analogue gauges to monitor.

He would have full authority to reach over and tweak thrust settings etc. in flight if he could see that it was a little asymmetric or the fuel burn wasn't correct. His instinctive knowledge of the aircraft's flight systems would probably have been better than that of the pilots doing the flying. Their ability to diagnose snags is incredible to hear.

We were changing a 737 Ignitor box one day and one of the screws was stripped. Our ex-flight engineer told me to go to the front toilet, close the door, and remove one of the screws from the metal framework of the door in the top right corner. It fit like a glove.

Engineers' knowledge of aircraft is staggering. I can see how it would be easy for this guy to masquerade as a pilot.
 
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