Thomas Harry Salme (born 18 February 1969, in Stockholm)[1] was convicted of flying passenger jets without a commercial pilot's license.
[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][6] 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.
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.
[8] He wrote a book in Swedish about his experiences, En bluffpilots bekännelse ("Confessions of a Con Pilot"), published in 2012 by Norstedts förlag.