BURST
A former flight attendant from Toronto allegedly posed as a pilot and used a fake identification card in order to fly for free hundreds of times, according to American authorities.
The 33-year-old has been charged with wire fraud after falsely posing as a commercial airline pilot, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Hawaii Ken Sorenson said on Tuesday. He was indicted last October after being arrested in Panama and extradited to the United States. The man also posed as a flight attendant, although he was not working as one at the time, court documents said.
He pleaded not guilty this week, the Associated Press reported.
The man “presented a fictitious employee identification card to obtain hundreds of flights at no cost,” over a period of four years, Sorenson said in a news release.
It is alleged that the man also requested a jump seat in the cockpit of an aircraft, even though he was “not a pilot and did not have an airman’s certificate.” A cockpit jump seat is an extra seat that can be occupied by a pilot who is not scheduled to work, Simple Flying explains . The U.S. attorney’s office told National Post that although he requested to use the jump seat, there is no information to indicate whether he did or not.
The man worked as a flight attendant at a Toronto-based airline roughly between July 2017 and October 2019, according to court documents obtained by National Post. The airline was not specified.
Porter Airlines, which is headquartered in Toronto, and WestJet, based in Calgary, did not immediately respond to National Post’s request. Canadian airlines such as Air Canada and Flair told National Post that the man had not been employed by them.
Daily Mail reported that the man used a fake ID to secure free flights on an online booking system reserved for airline staff. This method was used to book flights on airlines that were headquartered in Honolulu, Chicago, Illinois, Fort Worth and Toronto, according to court documents.
Although the airlines were not named, National Post has reached out to Hawaiian Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines for comment.
If convicted, the man faces up to 20 years in prison, a fine of up to US$250,000, plus a term of supervised release, Sorenson said.
A motion to detain him without bail was filed on Jan. 16. He is currently in custody at the Federal Detention Centre Honolulu located in Hawaii, a search of the Federal Bureau of Prisons database indicates.
The trial by jury is set to begin on March 17.
In a separate case out of Florida last June, a 35-year-old man booked “free flights on an airline carrier’s website that were only available to pilots and flight attendants,” a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office said . He was found guilty of wire fraud and “entering into a secure area of an airport by false pretenses.”
He took more than 120 free flights “by falsely claiming to be a flight attendant.”
The story of convicted felon and author Frank Abagnale Jr., made popular by the movie Catch Me If You Can, echoes the allegations against the ex-flight attendant from Toronto. The hit Hollywood film, based on Abagnale’s memoir, tells the story of a young man who scams his way into getting free flights by posing as an airline pilot. The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is eventually arrested by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks.
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