For thirteen years, a Stockholm-born man with Estonian roots slipped into European cockpits and flew thousands of passengers on nothing but nerve, talent and a licence he forged at his kitchen table.

There is a moment on every take-off when the world seems to hold its breath – the engines rising to a roar, the cabin falling quiet, the ground tilting away beneath you. In those suspended seconds, trust is absolute. You believe the person in the cockpit belongs there.

For thirteen years, that trust was placed in Thomas Harry Salme, a man born in Stockholm to an Estonian refugee family, a man whose uniform fit perfectly but whose papers did not exist. He captained passenger jets across Europe, flew thousands of people through cloud and night and turbulence, all while carrying a secret that shadowed every flight.

“I never forgot it,” he said. “The lie was always there. One phone call and everything collapses.”

Estonian-rooted Thomas Salme flew European airliners for 13 years without a licence. Private collection.

The world discovered that lie in 2010, when Dutch police stepped into a cockpit at Schiphol and quietly brought one of aviation’s strangest careers to an end. Now, years later, Estonian media – including Estonian Public Broadcasting and Eesti Ekspress – have revisited the story, dragging into daylight the mix of family history, hunger, luck and loophole that made it possible.

A family divided by war

To understand Salme’s audacity, you almost have to begin before he was born.

His grandfather Harri was drafted into the Red Army in 1940 and shipped to Siberia. When the Soviets returned to Estonia in 1944, his grandmother Klara fled with her children across the Baltic. Eight-year-old Heiki, Thomas’s future father, grew up believing his own father was dead. Meanwhile Harri, convinced his family had vanished, built a new life in Soviet Estonia.

“The family didn’t know the other half was alive,” Salme said. “It’s like something from a film.”

Estonian House in Stockholm.

By the time the two branches reconnected after Estonia regained independence, Thomas was already a young man torn between two identities – Swedish suburbia on one side, the Estonian diaspora’s memory of flight and loss on the other.

But there was another kind of flight that captured him entirely.

The boy at the runway

His father was a photographer. Thomas often joined him at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, standing close enough to feel the heat off the engines as planes rose into the sun.

“From that moment,” he said, “I wanted to fly. I wanted to see the world.”

Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport in 2004. Photo by Brorsson, shared under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

He inherited just enough money after his mother died young to earn a private pilot licence. It wasn’t enough for commercial training, which in Sweden required the kind of resources only the wealthy could manage. “I had the passion,” he said, “but not the money.”

That could have been the end of the story.

But then came a moment that belonged to a different era – a moment impossible to imagine now, sealed forever by September 11th and the tightening of global aviation.

The night-time simulator that changed his life

One evening in the late 1990s, Salme picked up the phone, dialled the SAS flight academy and asked, almost casually, whether he could use their full-flight simulators after hours.

A technician answered: “Ah, okay, come over then.”

He went. Again and again.

Alone in the cockpit of a machine mounted on hydraulic legs, glowing in the dim simulator hangar, he taught himself the grammar of airline flying. Engine fires. Rapid decompression. Hydraulic failures. Single-engine departures. Wind-shear escapes. He studied manuals like they were scripture.

“It took months before anything made sense,” he said. “But after a year… I could do everything.”

Inside the Boeing 737 Classic cockpit. Photo by Alasdair McLellan, shared under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Veteran pilots who later examined the case called it “astonishing”, “nearly impossible”. But possible it was. And for a young man who feared his dream slipping away, it was enough.

A forged licence and an open door

In 1997, an Italian airline, Air One, advertised for pilots. Thomas applied – and sat at his table constructing a fake commercial licence from his expired private one.

“No stamp. No signature,” he said. “Truly stupid.”

He even invented an airline, Aladdin Airlines, for his CV because he feared listing SAS might prompt a background check.

No one checked. No one called. No one questioned.

Air One hired him. He passed the simulator test with ease. Within eighteen months, he wore captain’s stripes. He built a life in Italy, became a father and flew Milan–Naples, Rome–Paris, Berlin–Lisbon.

Air One A320-200 on the tarmac. Photo by Konstantin von Wedelstaedt.

Yet inside, something coiled tighter with every year.

“I lied to everyone,” he told Eesti Ekspress. “To my father, to my wife, to my children, to my employer. It’s still very hard for me to talk about it.”

But another force tugged at him too: adrenaline.

“It became like a game with the system. To see what they would believe.”

Schiphol, 2010: the final descent

The end arrived quietly.

Thomas was resting in a hotel at Schiphol ahead of an evening flight to Ankara – he was, by then, flying for the Turkish-owned Corendon Airlines – when his phone rang. A colleague told him Dutch police had boarded the inbound aircraft and asked for him by name.

Corendon Airlines Boeing 737-800. Photo by MarcelX42, shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

He walked to the gate. Four men in reflective vests were waiting. Passengers queued behind him. His mouth went dry.

“I felt like I might faint,” he later wrote.

An officer examined his licence, frowned and said, “There is something wrong here.”

In a small airport office, Thomas exhaled – a long breath, thirteen years long – and said the words he had feared since the day he first stepped into a cockpit:

“I flew thirteen years without a licence.”

The officers looked at him as if he had stepped out of fiction.

“What?!”

The aftermath

The punishment was surprisingly mild: a €2,000 fine for document forgery and a one-year ban from flying. No airline filed a civil lawsuit.

He never flew a commercial aircraft again.

He rebuilt his life – first as a photographer (even becoming Inter Milan’s official photographer), then as a documentary filmmaker working on stories of organised crime and drug trafficking in the Americas and Italy. He reconnected with relatives in Estonia. He remarried. He continued on, altered but not destroyed.

Thomas Salme piloting a private plane, 2024. Private collection.

Asked how he sees himself now, he didn’t offer absolution.

“How I see myself doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is how others see the story.”

Would he do it again?

His answer is a mirror held up to both his ambition and the system that failed to stop him:

“If I were in the same position – unemployed, no money, no support – yes. I would do it again.”

He insists the real problem is structural. Commercial pilot training remains financially prohibitive; without money, the dream is out of reach. “On the honest path,” he said, “I never stood a chance.”

A story that should have been impossible

The loopholes that lifted him into the sky are gone now. Databases talk; documents cross borders; aviation has no space left for improvisation.

But the story remains – absurd, daring, troubling, strangely human. A man caught between skill and audacity, deception and duty, soaring thirty-six thousand feet above a world that had no idea who was at the controls.

“Sometimes,” he once remarked, “maybe once in a hundred years, you need one Thomas Salme to show the system doesn’t work.”