Rome -
On Facebook he was a dashing Lufthansa pilot who boasted about his travels and chatted with female flight attendants.
In reality, he is an unemployed 32-year-old Italian conman with a fake airline pilot's licence and an active imagination.
Like the character played by Leonardo Di Caprio in the film Catch Me If You Can about a conman pretending to be a pilot, “Captain Andrea Sirlo” even made into the cockpit.
But the man identified as Andrea P. was arrested last week, after being tracked by police over several months.
Investigators befriended him on Facebook and photographed him as he posed at Caselle Airport in Turin for the pictures that would make it to onto his page on the social networking site.
On April 6, Captain Sirlo was the third pilot on a flight from Munich to Turin operated by Air Dolomiti, police said.
He reportedly did not touch the controls of aircraft belonging to the Italian subsidiary of Lufthansa.
A spokeswoman for the airline confirmed that the incident took place but declined to comment further. “We are still checking what happened,” she told dpa.
A Munich airport spokesman said the conman had probably entered the aircraft as a passenger, and then assumed the identity of a crewman once inside the plane.
“You can assume he bought himself a ticket,” Peter Pruemm said.
And a Lufthansa spokesman in Frankfurt admitted there was evidence that Sirlo had played the trick on the German airline many times.
The spokesman, Christoph Meier, said it was difficult to completely supervise passengers inside planes, since they were allowed to walk around inside the cabin.
Andrea P. had taken on the name Sirlo from one of the take-off lanes at the airport in Turin. It was at the check-in area that police caught up with him on Friday.
A real pilot who became suspicious after being introduced to the imposter had tipped them off. The man in the pilot's dark uniform looked too young to be a flight captain, he said.
Authorities have charged Andrea P. for attempting to threaten air security and using a false identity.
It is not clear how many times he flew under the pretence of being a pilot or how he gained from the fraud - aside from the free travel.
The case echoes that of the 2002 Spielberg film based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr, who flew on some 250 Pan Am flights to more than 20 countries in the 1960s on a forged pilot's licence. Abagnale carried out the con between the ages of 16 and 18 and evaded the authorities for years. - Sapa-dpa