An Italian man going by the name Andrea Sirlo – not quite Andrea Pirlo huh? – impersonated a pilot and managed to fly from Munich to Turin back in April. Pretty crazy huh? Well, not actually that crazy – it turns out the dude was only the third pilot on the plane and so didn’t actually touch any of the controls or fly the plane – which is kind of lame – but it’s still kinda cool he managed to impersonate a pilot and fool everyone and hitch a ride in the cockpit.
Of course, the airline might just be lying about the flying the plane thing so they don’t look even stupider than they already do. It also makes me question why they even bother taking a third pilot if all they do is sit there and don’t actually need to do anything involving flying the plane? I guess it’s good to have a backup but do pilots actually collapse or anything in real life, or is that just something dumb that happens in movies like Executive Decision and Airplane?
In any case, it looks as if Andrea Sirlo may have been pulling these pranks for a while. Apparently when he was arrested, he led police to a garage which contained a whole bunch of white shirts, black trousers and jackets that were similar to a pilot’s uniform. This kind of implies that he did this kind of shit fairly regularly. I mean if you can get free rides on planes why not huh? You could go on holiday every weekend because the air fare wouldn’t cost you anything.
The cops said that they had been aware of Sirlo’s activity for a while now and had been tailing him as a precaution, but that kinda makes you think that he can’t have been doing it that much because they surely would have arrested him by now right? I guess they might have wanted to monitor him for a bit to see if he was an actual terrorist and not just some weird guy who liked dressing up as a pilot and pretending to be one. A cop from Turin called Filippo Vanni had the following statement to make about the dude:
‘He’s so good that with his fake uniform, fake degrees and fake badge, he tricked a lot of people into believing he really was a pilot and also some crew members bought it. That’s how he got a ‘lift’ on the Turin-Munich flight in the cockpit, actually in the seat reserved for special guests, behind the co-pilot. He tried to create a new life for himself, where he could be accepted, gain friends and access a whole new social setting.’
This only serves to add fuel to the thesis that Andrea Sirlo is a complete weirdo – he was impersonating a pilot to make friends?! If you’re gonna do that why don’t you just pretend be something cool like a pro wrestler or a video game designer or something. Pilots aren’t cool. Who sits at home dreaming of hanging out with pilots and going to their parties? Nobody, that’s who, except maybe freaks like Andrea Sirlo.
But more importantly with all this evidence coming up who knows how many times he might have done this in the past? He blatantly did it all the time which makes him a sickhead, albeit a bit of weirdo sure. I guess if he actually wasn’t flying the plane then his actions aren’t really hurting anyone and are actually just kinda cool, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can (Sirlo actually said he saw the movie and wanted to be Leonardo DiCaprio in it, so I guess it actually inspired him to do this), although he has now been arrested and is facing a trial for ‘putting airline security at risk’ and ‘usurping a title’ which sounds kinda serious. Still, at the end of Catch Me If You Can Leonardo DiCaprio got a job working with Tom Hanks at the FBI so maybe Andrea Sirlo won’t end up in jail and will end up doing something like that or being a secret agent or something. Stay tuned and next time you get on a plane try and make sure that the people flying it are actually pilots.
