The case of the fake captain inevitably drew worldwide attention at the time, after he was dramatically arrested sitting in the cockpit of a Corendon Boeing 737 on the tarmac at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010.

The story is reminiscent of the 2002 Steven Spielberg-directed comedy "Catch Me If You Can," also based on a true story, in which Leonardo DiCaprio poses as a top airline pilot, as well as also a doctor and a lawyer.

In Thomas Salme's case, however, he didn't just pose as a pilot, he actually worked as one, chalking up around 10,000 flight hours, much of them as a captain, before eventually being busted. The saga started at a time when documentation was still often held on paper rather than digitally, and before 9/11, when security around airports and aviation became much tighter.

During his time flying, Salme, 56, transported hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Leaning on audacity, charm and incompetency in aviation oversight, Salme built up a false identity, followed by a relatively successful career, while it lasted.

"I'm still amazed that I was able to get away with this for thirteen years with so many airlines," Salme told "Pealtnägija."

Flight instructor Tõnis Lepp meanwhile, called it "surely unique and barely believable," while a relative of Thomas, Siim Salme, noted: "What is astonishing is that one person has so much courage to pull off such a stunt … I'll become an aircraft pilot, a commercial airline pilot, but I'll do it by forging my own papers."

The Salmes as a whole have a tale which strains at credulity even without this scandal.

The patriarch, Harri, a Tallinner, and Thomas' grandfather, was forcibly drafted into the Red Army with the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940, ending up in Siberia. When the Red army returned to Estonia in 1944, the family — mother Klara and children Maria and Heiki, Thomas' father — fled across the Baltic, to Sweden. Eight-year-old Heiki knew nothing of his father's location at that time. "We all thought Harri was dead. And then I found out he was alive; he was 54 or 55 [by then]," Heiki Salme recalled.

Harri happily survived the war, but had no clue where his family had disappeared off to. He then formed a new partnership in Soviet Estonia, which led to two more children being born.

"My father, too, ever since they fled, has never seen his half-brother," Siim said, referring to his father, or Harri's son by his second relationship.

Divided by the Iron Curtain, these two wings of the family knew of each other, but contact was minimal during the Soviet era.

Heiki and his Swedish wife had a son, whom they named Thomas, born in Stockholm in 1969.

"We were like an Estonian community. You can never take away where you come from. So my Estonian name and my blood are inside me, and I'm very proud that it's a small country, to fight against the big guys, you know. My father, still today can speak with his brother in Estonian. Unfortunately, I never picked it up," Thomas said.

"Thomas was interested in sports, too. He played football and ice hockey, but his big passion was airplanes and flying," Heiki recounted.

"I started I think when I was eight or nine years old, and I remember that I went out with my father to Stockholm Arlanda Airport; we were going to make some photoshoot — he was a semi-professional photographer — and once we were there and I saw all those planes, different-colors, taking off and landing, from that moment on I wanted to be an airline pilot. I wanted to see the world and I wanted to fly," Thomas added.

In 1990, Thomas traveled alone, the first person in his family to visit Estonia, on the eve of the restoration of independence, and met up with his father's half-brother. He even held little Siim, his nephew, in his arms. However, flying remained his great dream.

When Thomas's mother died of cancer at a relatively young age, she left him a modest inheritance, enough to obtain private pilot training. However, he couldn't afford to renew his license later on, never mind continue on to commercial pilot training. He made do with reading aviation magazines and listening to air-traffic-control radio until one evening, he managed to blag his way into the flight simulators at Arlanda Airport for some after-hours practice.

"Crazy idea — I wasn't thinking about it, but one evening I called up the SAS flight academy. I knew that pilots were not training during the night, but there were simulator technicians. They were these big simulators they had to maintain. So what I did was I called them and said: 'Hello, my name is Thomas, I'm a pilot, I don't have a job, could I come…' He said, 'Ah, okay, come over.' You know, Sweden — very safe — this was before September 11. I went out to Stockholm, and they said, 'I'll put you here because I have to go to other simulators to work. What airport do you want? Do you want to have Stockholm, Arlanda, Copenhagen, Oslo?' I said, 'No, put me in John F. Kennedy, New York,'" Salme recounted.

Former airline captain Jaanus Orusalu noted that commercial pilots' licenses are indeed costly to obtain, even as inside Estonia, these huge costs are not present.

"He frames it himself as being driven to the deception by his enormous passion for flying, but with no money. In that sense, it's entirely true that in Estonia, we have an exceptional opportunity to study to become a pilot for free on the state's dime. The rest of the world absolutely does not work like that. Elsewhere, this is hundreds of thousands of euros," said Orusalu.

Then there is the actual process of learning to fly in a full simulator, without formal instruction.

Orusalu, with over 20 years' experience, and Lepp, who flew over 40, both by turns salute and condemn Salme. Learning to fly in a simulator is, they say, not impossible in principle, but doing so alone is still an incredible feat.

"In a simulator, you do learn to fly completely. Because the simulator — if we're talking about a full-flight simulator, on hydraulic legs and moving, that expensive device — then sitting in that cockpit feels like a real aircraft. It is practically no different from a real plane," Lepp explained.

"He certainly was not stupid. When you learn those things there, this is no easy feat, and the ordinary person, if they pick up the manuals and go into the simulator, won't understand a thing. It requires a great dedication, which he likely had," added Orusalu.

Salme himself said it took him months before he began to make any headway whatsoever, yet he had it down pat after a year and a half. Then, half jokingly, he opted to apply to an ad from a little-known Italian airline, Air One, which was looking for a first officer, in other words, a pilot, and second in command after the captain.

"I did not think that it was going to work. I saw there was a magazine looking for pilots in Italy. OK, let's apply for a job... Did a CV that was, of course, completely fake. Very naive — didn't have a license, did a license in a very bad manner, cut it out, no stamp, no signature. Really kind of a stupid boy. "

Nonetheless, it fooled Air One. But what about when it came to previous experience, how could Thomas say he worked for any airline before, when he patently had not?…

… Enter "Aladdin Airlines," purely fictitious, and a product of Thomas' own imagination. "I invented Aladdin Airlines. Never existed," he confessed.

Be it down to shining in Air One's simulator test, or a lack of due diligence into Salme's background on the part of airline officials, the amateurish forgery was the genesis of a decade-long career in aviation.

"That likely derived from the fact that these European countries didn't communicate with each other. And the airline probably didn't check it, so such a security gap was likely present," Orusalu surmised of how Salme got away with it.

"I felt two things: I felt I'm happy, I called my father, my friends—'I got a job here!' … At the same time I felt very lonely, like, this is my secret, I know I'm doing something bad. This is not good. But you know, you're living your dream, you go for it. I took a risk," Salme added.

His first real cockpit time came on the Milan–Naples route in 1997. The simulator provided part of the skill set needed; on-the-job training as a co-pilot, the rest.

"Most likely he worked harder than some other pilots, because he knew he couldn't afford to make any mistakes," Siim suggested.

"I don't know if it was because I wanted to hide something, but I always had a kind first feeling that I wanted to do it safely," Salme continued.

"It's the same as driving a car but with no test — you would probably drive very well, fully observing every traffic rule," Orusalu noted.

And it did seem to be the case: After 18 months, Thomas found himself promoted to captain at Air One. This prestige and the accompanying payrise helped him build a family life in Italy, and he became a father.

All pilots still had to regularly pass proficiency checks, particularly to sharpen readiness for malfunctions and emergency situations. "To be ready for those emergencies means the pilot goes twice a year into the same simulator to fly through emergency scenarios. Typical emergencies are. Engine failure, fires, a loss of pressurization, the incapacitation of the other pilot," Lepp explained.

In 2004, Captain Salme, as he now was, passed with flying colors, to pardon the pun. However, there was a slight glitch: This needed collating with the aviation country in his home country, ie. Sweden.

But Thomas found a way here, too. "I found a hole in the system. I did the simulator at the airline." That all went well.

The accompanying paperwork was done in triplicate. "One for me, one for the company, and one for the license: For the Swedish aviation [authority]"

The last of these was supposed to have been sent off to Sweden, which could have blown the cover. But Salme was not to be deterred, telling the airline he could hand-deliver the documentation since he was about to travel home to Sweden anyway.

"'I can do it myself, give it to me, I'm going to Sweden anyway,'... but I never did that'," he confided.

Both Salme and the experts say the fraud worked out because he had operated outside Sweden and paperwork was, back then, just that: All mostly on paper. The stunt would be harder to pull off today.

"Yes, in hindsight. Now everything is so electronic it would be very, very, very hard to forge," Orusalu noted.

"If he had sent even some document off to the Swedish authority saying he had undergone a check for such-and-such aircraft, then of course the Swedish authority would look at it and say — wait a minute — do we even have such a person, does he have that qualification. I maintain the Swedish authority had no idea that person was flying," said Lepp.

"My moral point of view all this time has always been that I have always passed the simulator checks from the companies. It's not that I think I'm good, I passed it," Salme insisted.

Salme did mull over whether it was worth going legit. However, he came to realize he was too far in to do this without raising some pretty awkward questions.

In 2005, he came very close to being caught out. An Air One employee had contacted Swedish authorities about Salme and found that no one of that name held a valid commercial pilot's license there. However, this was seen as an expired license, not one which had never existed, and in any case, the matter went no further.

As to whether the Italian airline knew of the situation but did not want to bring scandal on themselves by firing him, Salme said that was indeed the case. In fact, Air One settled with him quietly and let him go.

That could have been the end of the party, but it was not. Thomas, perhaps due to his competent performance, started to get new job offers from other airlines, even at a higher pay scale. Turkish carrier Corendon Airlines was one of these.

But Thomas' main motivating factor by this stage was to avoid getting caught, and do keep up the facade, he doubled down.

"In the end, I lied just for fun. To see what they'd say. I added that I was a fighter pilot for a special force in Sweden," adding that he did not know anything about military aviation.

This ended up being a bit too much of a millstone to deal with, however. "There's a stress inside of you if you're doing this kind of big lie… It's not fun to live with," Salme explained.

For Lepp, this was irresponsible. "It's absolutely impermissible. Aviation is dangerous. Any sort of lifting off the ground is dangerous — humans are not designed to fly. That we can fly is all thanks to our minds, physics, documents — the whole thing. We do everything possible to make it as safe as possible when a person goes into the air. But in his case, he didn't do everything possible. He was able to fly, he knew how the radio worked, he knew the rules, he managed all those aspects. But you also need the foundational training," Lepp went on.

For Orusalu, that no disaster befell Salme, his colleagues and the passengers was just down to chance. "He was lucky!" Orusalu said.

Time was starting to run out for Thomas, who said he reckoned he had about two more years left, during which time he wanted to save up a bit of money, before quietly fading away.

But this was not to be...

With hindsight, it is unclear who blew the whistle in the end, but someone did. In March 2010, just before he was to depart on another Amsterdam to Ankara flight, the local police appeared and checked his documentation right there and then, in the cockpit.

"This is the part where it happened and we had this light on, and he was doing did this and then he said 'There's something is wrong here.' At that time, I knew they understood. So I said to them: 'Can we go to the office and speak?' And they said yes. They never put the handcuffs on. I went to the office — two aviation police guys... They said: 'Captain Salme, we believe that your license is not valid.' At that time, I said: 'You know what, I'm going to tell them everything.' And I told them I had been flying for thirteen years without a licence. And they were like: 'What?!'"

The story went viral worldwide, but the inevitable punishment was surprisingly mild, "Pealtnägija" reported. Salme was essentially only fined €2,000 for document falsification and was banned for a year from flying.

The airlines didn't even file civil claims against him, perhaps not wanting to amplify the scandal.

"After about two weeks, I was released, and after another two weeks came the sentence of … €2,000. Of course, I was happy," he went on.

From then, until now, it has been simulators only for Salme. He has never set foot in a real airliner cockpit since

"Never! In the simulator, yes, for interviews and for fun, but never … never again." No temptations? "Nope. Simulators, playing around, but after 10,000 hours, I feel I'm kind of, that's it!"

Thomas still lives in Italy, has remarried, written an autobiography, and is now working as a documentary filmmaker. His father has relocated to Italy, too.

The media attention helped him re-establish contact with relatives in Estonia, which was one bright spot.

For the aviation sector as a whole, not least for fee-paying passengers, the rules were tightened directly due to Salme's actions and those of his employers and the authorities: Pulling off a similar trick would, it is claimed, no longer be possible.

Salme himself remains philosophical about that whole chapter of his life.

"If everybody did like me, society wouldn't work. There would be confusion. But sometimes, in certain aspects, maybe once every hundred years, I don't know, you need a Thomas Salme, to show that the system is not working," he concluded.

The Salme case was reportedly one of several fake resume scandals that led to airlines and other employers tightening their vetting procedures.

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