Back in the 90’s you didn’t have to show ID to get on a plane as a passenger. I’d imagine the 60’s and 70’s were even more lax.
And to be clear, Abagnale says he never piloted a plane, he just sat in the jump seat for free flights.
I’ve seen Abagnale’s talk and I will be sad if it turns out mostly to be false. He was a great speaker.
The story sounds even better to me if he was making it all up. For an imposter it shows great skill and commitment to go to jail for crimes you made up.
He didn’t make up the pilot part. My mother remembers when there were newspaper articles about him doing it. Doesn’t remember if they called him the skyway man like they did in the movie, but remembers when they were on to him and looking for him.
Abagnale says he was asked to guest pilot the planes on ocasion (I believe it’s the first chapter in his book) and that he would turn on auto-pilot and hoped it worked.
I read his book 35 years ago and was skeptical of it then and am skeptical of it now. Virtually everything in the book rests on his words alone, and much of it makes little sense (e.g. his supposed personal cat-and-mouse game with a specific FBI agent (O’Reilly? O’Brien?)).
[On a broader scale, I also think that much of what passes for history of the mafia is also bogus, as it relies heavily on the words of mobsters themselves, who are/were not only hugely dishonest but were also mostly passing along third-hand gossip that they heard in mob circles versus actual knowledge. There’s no reason to put more credence in some mobster’s claim that Lucky Luciano did such-and-such than in another mobster’s claim that Jimmy Hoffa is buried in such-and-such place.]
Yes, the film and the book make him out as some sort of good guy, or at least harmless. But surprise, surprise surprise, the conman lied about what he did.
And what did he really do? Steal from senior citizens, just like all con men do:
She didn’t trust him, but her family did. They cooked meals for him, and introduced him to people in Baton Rouge. He would take the family out to dinner and buy them flowers, earning their trust. All the while he was doing that with checks he stole from them, which he had rifled through. He stole about $1,200 from the family, and more from local businesses in Baton Rouge.
All these films and such showing conmen with elaborate cons vs rich, greedy evil dudes? Mostly fake. Con men steal from the elderly, con men are evil. Abagnale was evil.
Sorta. He showed up in a Pilots uniform and conned a stewardesses parents at their home. He never flew a plane or anything remotely like that.
Sitting in the co-pilots seat in an airliner already in the air is hardly piloting, if he did that at all. There would have been an actual pilot in the seat next to him. Saying he turned on the auto-pilot sounds like pure BS, if those were even his words. He’s a skilled conman and fraud and he tells a good story but the reality is pretty basic.
In the talk I saw he didn’t try to hide from that. He was open about what he had done was wrong and that he’d never be able to make up for it.
In Aus (where I live), you didn’t even need a uniform. Showing up at check in with a pilot ID card would have been enough.
So what happens when the real pilot shows up?
I think the point is, Abagnale’s story was that he wasn’t pretending to be a specific real pilot, but that he’d say, how do you do, fellow aviators; I, too, am a pilot working for your our employer! So, uh, what vacation spot are you guys flying to? Wow, what a coincidence; that’s totally where the guy who signs our paychecks wants me to soon fly some VIPs out of! What’s that? Sit in that seat at no charge? Gosh, thanks; I’ll do the same for you, if the situation is ever the other way around!
He notices that some other pilot he doesn’t know is a passenger on his plane.
You guys are pretty wrapped up in his impersonation of a pilot. The part that really spooked me was when he pretended to be a doctor.
I concure!
According to the story, it was always ‘a pilot working for the competition’. He didn’t want to get caught out on things he should have known/people he should have known.
AIR, he dressed as American Airlines, and never flew American Airlines.
Back in the day, pilots were very relaxed about having someone in the cockpit to talk to, during those long quiet times between takeoff and landing. Sport and flying and other non-controversial subjects.
It was Pan Am
That makes somewhat more sense, but even in the 1960s wouldn’t the airlines have at least called the pilot and said something like, “We need to get a couple of pilots down to Miami. They will be showing up on your 10am from Chicago to Miami. Their names will be Bill Smith and Kenny Thompson. Please give them a seat on your plane so we can get them down there. Thanks.”
If not, then conning must have been really easy back then.
Nope. Nobody would call, things weren’t centrally coordinated very well. And airline personnel expected to fly free for any reason, not just because the airline needed them someplace. And to some extent they could do this on any airline.
Then if he did what he said he did, he provided a service. It would seem like a guy could just walk into a bank and say he was from the regional office and they wanted him, fellow bank employee, to transport the money from the local vault to the regional vault. If they had such lax standards, then they were educated by his con.