I've heard stories of Hercules pilots taking up Paras for parachute jumps, donning parachutes themselves and bailing out, leaving the loader or a RAF policeman to land the Herc!
A variation of this was an old favourite in the RAAF Herc squadrons during the days of National Service.
Last sortie of the day, 96-odd (odd!) very callow youths SLF-ing it up the ramp of the Herc and one of the pilots, in the Loadie's flight jacket, begs and wheedles the 'pilot' (the Loadie wearing the pilot's jacket), to "keep his promise to let him have a fly". After repeatedly saying it can't be done "...because we've got pax. I thought we'd be empty when I said you could fly it", the 'pilot' eventually relents and gives in to the 'Loadie', who climbs over all the already seated pax telling everyone who'll listen that he's going to fly the aircraft for the very first time.
90% of the pax almost certainly saw through the ruse, but from the quoted post above, there were obviously a few who swallowed it.
I only ever did it once out of Wagga, (with Loadie who was only a year or two older than I was, which made the ruse believable). I don't know if the Grunts bought it, but we were all highly amused with ourselves.
John Balfe wrote a very readable book about flying C47s in Papua New Guinea with the RAAF's 38 Squadron during WW2. On a massed airlift of veteran American troops straight from the battlefield from Lae to Port Moresby, he tells the story of him and his loadmaster pulling this same stunt.
The US Sergeant with the thousand yard stare who was in charge of the chalk had just survived three months in the jungle fighting the Japanese and wasn't about to let these strange "AuSSies" kill him now. He stuck his Thompson in the face of the "loadmaster" who was about to take off and refused to listen when the suddenly no longer laughing crew tried to convince him that the man in the pilot's seat was in fact the pilot.
They had to taxi clear of the active and totally disrupt a very tight departure sequence - and explain to the OiC of the airport why they weren't able to get airborne. The senior officer was NOT amused.