Originally Posted by
Asturias56
Slippery slope tho'
"Excuse me Sir, you claim to be an OAP. Can I see your birth certificate, and a certified DNA report proving you are who you say you are? Then we'll let you have the 10% discount on this cinema seat"
There is a world of jobs-worths who would thing they'd reached heaven.
I absolutely get your point....
The issue here is that anyone call can themselves whatever they want to be and some step into that job without the required qualifications and more through luck than judgement, they are caught before anything bad happens.......as per another thread, you can be a fraudulent war hero or someone like that but that is unlikely to physically hurt anyone, they are not in a position where they have the lives of others in their hands - so to speak. Whereas a fraudulent Captain (or just a fraudulent pilot of any category) does have lives in their hands and the "vehicle", namely an aircraft, is sufficiently high enough off the ground that if they make a wrong move at 38000ft due to being a fraud, the outcome is always going to be catastrophic compared to a faked driver or ship captain where you are on terra firma level and there are ways and means of getting to you before it gets too far......aboard an aircraft you are far more vulnerable to the exploits of a fake behind the controls since it is not possible to be flagged to stop and explain your actions or behaviour like you can with a car with an unlicenced driver at the wheel.
I do have to wonder if actual bona fide pilots get a gut feeling that something is "off" with the person sat beside them occasionally...apart from paperwork checks and employment history checks, how do airlines actually know 100% for sure that they are employing legitimate people, getting references from past employers is probably the best way to find a fraud, but do airlines request those on a regular basis and wait for the response, or are they guilty of taking the word of their potential employee too often?
The faked pilots sat beside the bone fide pilots problem is a different situation to most other Mitty situations as there is far more to lose and the end result is going to be far more catastrophic should that fake pilot stuff things up so badly that the bone fide pilot alongside is unable to reverse things by virtue of being 30000ft or more in the air and no-one can help rescue you up there.