Thomas Salme

Thomas Harry Salme (born 18 February 1969) is a Swedish photographer and documentary film maker and also a former pilot who became a celebrity after flying passenger jets for thirteen years without a commercial pilot's license. He's now living in Milano, Italy, with his 3 children. After working as a captain from 1997 to 2010 for several international airline companies – such as the Turkish and Dutch Corendon Airlines, the Italian Air One, and the English Jet2 – Salme was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010. Nowadays he has gone back to his original passion for photography and filmmaking and is working as a professional photographer in Milan, Italy, collaborating on a regular basis with the Italian football club Inter Milan.

Salme was born in Stockholm in 1969 to a middle-class family and his father was senior engineer of IBM. He was deeply influenced by his father, from whom he inherited both his passion for flying and photography. He first fell in love with piloting at the age of 8, when he accompanied his father on a photo shooting at the Swedish airport of Arlanda.

Despite his family's financial conditions, which didn't allow him a formal training, he was determined not to give up on his dream to become a pilot and, thanks to a friend of his working as a simulator technician at Scandinavian Airlines, he managed to sneak into the training centre at night where he would train on the flight simulator for two or three hours at a time, at least 15 to 20 times over one and a half years. His flying skills were further strengthened by several technical manuals that he read over the course of those years.

In 1997, Salme felt ready to test his flying skills on a real Boeing and therefore he decided to apply for the Italian airline company Air One as a co-pilot. In order to achieve his purpose, he made himself a Swedish flying permit with a logo out of regular white paper, with a forged ID number.

In 1999, he was appointed captain and kept on working in Air One until 2006. He then moved to the Turkish and Dutch airline company Corendon, where he worked as a Captain for a year, before being offered a contract at the English Jet2. After only ten months he decided to go back to work for Corendon Airlines, where he regularly flew passenger jets for another two years before he was arrested in 2010.

Salme was caught at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010, while seated in the cockpit of a Corendon Boeing 737 carrying 101 passengers just a few minutes before take-off. Officers, who were alerted by a Swedish tip-off, said the man had once had a private pilot license, but it had expired and it never qualified him for passenger flights. As a result, he was fined £1,700 and was banned from flying for 12 months by a Dutch court, which, however, noted that in the entire 13 years, he had never caused an accident.

Salme is now a caring father of two sons and one daughter currently lives in Milan, Italy, where he works as a professional fashion and sport photographer for several magazines and football companies, such as Malibu Lifestyle Magazine, Lucire global Fashion Magazine and Inter Milan. In September 2012 he completed a photo shoot around the major State Parks in the USA, which Alidem a gallery in Milan has bought.

He has also collected his anecdotes and experiences as a co-pilot in the book En bluffpilots bekännelse (confessions of a con pilot) Thomas Salme 13 Years in Heaven, published in 2012 by the Swedish publisher Norstedts, known for the Stieg Larson trilogy. He is now ready with the English book together with Tom Watt who wrote the biography of David Beckham. Thomas English book named "13 years in heaven" will be out in Italy 2017 with Cairo Publishing.

In 2013 Thomas met the former drug lord Jota Cardona and started to film the life of Jota, resulting in the documentary film "Rescued From Hell" www.rescuedfromhell.com which is to be released in 2017 worldwide as a TV documentary.