This comes a couple of years after the last post on this thread, and I appreciate that. First a word about how I came by it.
Mark Lamb was a mate of mine, and he dissapeared off my radar a while back (around the time of the prosecution) so I was doing a google search this morning to see if I could track him down (I know he moved abroad a while back) and stumbled on tis. At first I thought it was a co-incidence seeing his name, but Mark Lamb, lives near Lutterworth, flies with EMASU, all fitted and sadly confirmed that the friend I thought was someone with considerable flying experience was not what he seemed.
Let me first defend him. Mark was, and if he is still flying I am sure continues to be, a skilled an competent pilot irrespective of whether his ability to fly a machine marries up with the qualifications I, and others, believed he held. In fact it was his ab ility to fly that made him "credible". I flew with him a number of times in an EC120 between Redhill and Kilworth Springs Golf Club (where he sometimes parked on a verge next to the club house), as well as in a Bell in and out of Denham (where he had some established contacts at HeliAir, including Q Smith the owner of the firm), and in R22/44 both in the UK and US (at Group 3 Aviation in LA, which he said he had a stake in and which at the time I had no reason to doubt, though obviously now I wonder). Mark was also a friend whenever I needed one, and so I can understand why people at the ASU would feel comfortable in his presence. In fact, on one occasion I drove up to the ASU for a coffee and a catch up (around 2001 IIRC) probably on one of the days he was on a training flight as he was kicking about in a flying suit.
I would hope that court case notwithstanding, that he manages to "rehabilitate" himself should he still be flying. I can see a defence that it was a bit of bragging that went too far. Mark was highly accomplished in the IT field having worked for a large city law firm and a number of other start ups and he certainly had earned considerable sums out of his skills. I can only summise that IT wasn't where is "heart" was, and what he wanted was to ingratiate himself in the world that he wanted to belong to. The fact is, he had the skills and aptitude certainly, and most likely the means as well to put himself through the training that would have given him the career he aspired to.
I feel let down in a sense, but he is/was my mate, so I also feel compelled to stand by him in the face of the criticisms he has had on this thread. The fact that many of those criticisms are mostly warranted in one form or another is not an easy thing to accept in someone I considered a mate, and I'd still stand by him no matter what, though I do also want to kick his backside for using me to add credibility to a personae that was clearly made up (though he isn't the worst offender: just ask anyone from the AAC around 10 years ago who knows the story of the fat "Idi Amin" lookalike that blagged his way onto a flying cse without doing Grading with a falsified logbook, got kicked off the course and went to SA and persuaded the SADF to lend him and his girlfriend a Bell which he then crash-landed in the desert when it ran out of fuel).