Being a private pilot I extremely rarely drop into these threads, but let me point out a few things...
Logbook forgery is hardly going to be limited to India or whatever. You don't need a PhD to work out that any flight logged right here in the UK, between non-ATC airfields, can be forged. OK, the smaller ones supposedly keep visitor books, but for how long? The long road to an ATPL can easily take years of hour building, and if you have to stuff your logbook with hundreds of hours, the "option" is staring you in the face. And is forging 100 hours somehow morally "better" than forging 1000 hours?
And is illegal logbook stuffing much worse than renting a C150 in Arizona and flying up and down between two airports, day and night, on a 100-hour rental block at £35/hour (a price current not that many years ago)? It must be, because the C150 time is so relevant to flying an A330
Then move onto various "easy routes" which have existed at various times. Even in ultra gold plated JAA-land, there have been "ways" to convert one set of non-JAA ICAO papers into JAA ones. One super route closed only last year. Ireland used to convert various papers into JAA ones, until it became too well known. A lot of these routes hang on the concept that almost every country will give you a local CPL/IR if you have another ICAO CPL/IR and have a relationship with a commercial operator on the country's registry, and the relationship can be just doing some ad hoc stuff, working as a flight instructor, etc. Many pilots avoided the 14 ATPL exams by doing these routes. I am sure most of "us" would have jumped at the chance of avoiding the 14-exam JAA garbage-swatting process whose relevance to aviation, as I happen to be more than familiar with, is somewhere below 10%. I've just got 96% on the 1960s RAF radar set stuff... but is it relevant? None of this is illegal but "pot and kettle" come to mind
And then look at the whole JAA CPL/IR / ATPL process. For all the gold plating, most of it is utter garbage. The 14 exams are, as I say, more than 90% nonsense which has zero (zilch) relevance to any practical form of aviation. I bet that if you dragged the entire BA Captain population, in their Col Gaddafi ceremonial dress, into an exam room, they would fail the exams comprehensively. Well, not IFR Comms
European pilots have no basis for regarding themselves superior for having passed through this classroom sausage machine, whose syllabus is almost wholly an ego trip of long-retired ex RAF navigators.
And then you have the flight training, banging so many hours in a clapped out Seminole or whatever, flying NDB holds to "perfection". Another syllabus writer ego trip whose relevance to aviation ended with, approximately, the Comet
And then you have the hordes of starry eyed airline pilot wannabees travelling the well worn tracks to places like Hungary in search of a CV test where the AME will not keep a record of anybody who failed - a priceless facility because you are allowed only
one fail in your lifetime of each of the four or so CV tests. How many 10000hr BA Captains got their initial CV test down there? The whole JAA medical system where you are allowed Demonstrated Ability
only on a Renewal is a complete in-your-face perverted farce which flies in the face of any sort of natural justice, never mind recruiting on the basis of demonstrable ability to do the job. Even the CAA, in its famous CV study (doubtless prompted by the haemorrhage of Medical Dept income to certain "outlying" JAA members), has admitted that the existing CV tests are basically garbage and only the W-H Lantern test means anything. Most of the most experienced jet pilots have significant hearing problems by the time they retire. It doesn't affect their ability to do the job.
Obviously there is a difference between outright illegality, and everything short of that, but does it suprise anybody that when somebody sees the almost complete farce which pilot training and medicals are in this gold-plated land, they decide to help themselves a little? And where exactly do you draw the line when somebody has found a "little hole" in the system somewhere?
(FAA CPL/IR, JAA PPL, FAA & JAA Class 1 medicals, 1300hrs)