Phony aircraft engineer goes to jail

I can hear him now… “Now you prepare that Fetzer valve with some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads. And I’m gonna need ’bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State.”

Makes me wonder how secure their hiring practices are. Seems he must have known a fair bit about the industry to be able to fake his way through the job interview.

The judge also criticised Mr McCormack for presenting four forged character references at an earlier hearing, in order to get a lighter prison term.

Now they know to look really close at those release papers he is handing them.

I just found a viable recovery plan following my loss of employment!

They say he wasn’t qualified, but does that mean he had no idea what he was doing, or he didn’t have a license? I don’t think getting the license is the only definition of being qualified. Like in big companies, and only IT is allowed to connect a new mouse to your computer.

the article is so vague, that it’s hard to figure out what the actual problem was. my guess would be that he’s really an aeronautical engineer, and had a real knowledge of the work he was doing, but simply was not certified. In the US, you have to have a Professional Engineer certification in order to perform many project engineering/management jobs. The faked exams were probably the Australian equivalent of the FE/EIT exams here in the US. Incidentally, if this is the actual scenario, I can guarantee that this is happening in the US, too.

#13 – Lyin’ Mike

>>Notice they fired the guys who went through
>>his files.

Ahh, Mike. Yer lyin’ again. They didn’t fire “the guys”; in the face of massive pressure from the Repuglican Machine, Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Department of Job and Family Services was put on administrative leave for a month. Just to give an idea of the wrath she incurred from the far right, She was receiving protection from the Ohio Highway Patrol during her leave.

I don’t blame the Repugs for being pissed though; they built up a hero who was a plumber, looking to buy the business he worked for, and was a red-blooded American.

Imagine the stinging shame when it turned out he wasn’t a plumber, he had no plans to buy the business, and he owed back taxes. Uh-oh. Awkward.

>>I certainly don’t think you need a license
>>to be a plumber, except maybe to lay pipe
>>for buildings.

I suppose, technically, you don’t need a license to be an electrician, an automobile driver, an airline pilot, a brain surgeon, or an airplane engineer. If you’re a good enough
bullshitter, you can go through the motions.

The fact remains, you need a license to be a plumber in Ohio, and to get a license, you need to have apprenticed to a real plumber, and Joe the “plumber” did not do so.

First I have heard of this I live in Australia. I am not a TV/Radio NEWS hound. I do read the papers on and off line though. It would not surprise me that he may have been hired through a Job Agency. Its a fairly new phenomena here in Australia. What I know about some of these Job agency there seems to be no real checks on them. Anyone could set one up here from what I have been told. Just get the job placement and move on. Its wide open for this sort behavior. Take the money and run.

#17 – Lyin’ Mike

>>Mustard,you’re out of date. Three people in
>>Ohio’s government aren’t coming back from leave.

Well gawrsh, Lyin’ Mike, you’ll have to forgive me if I ask for a link to back that up. What with your name and all, I don’t feel comfortable accepting that without some factual backup.

I’ll admit I haven’t been performing round-the-clock surveillance of news articles related to Joe the “plumber”, but the last I heard (around the end of November), Helen Jones-Kelley was put on administrative leave for a month at the insistence of the outraged Repuglican Machine. The Machine wanted her head, of course, but there was no evidence of any political or criminal intent, and the woman DID, as director of the Department of Job and Family Services, have legitimate reasons why she may have looked into his background. None of the results of her record-checking were made public nor were they shared inappropriately.

The Repugs just wanted some blood to spill because their hero, Joe the “plumber” had been exposed (not by Jones-Kelley, but by reporters investigating him) as a fraud, a sham, a charlatan, a scammer, a confidence man, a fake. There was also talk of a low-level functionary in the police department who got spanked when a reporter snookered him into looking into Joe the “plumber”’s criminal history.

>>This Republican machine you speak of isn’t
>>even running the state.

Ah, there you go again. Doing your name proud. I never said they were “running the state”. I said that in their anger over Joe the “plumber” having been revealed as a fake, they pushed mightily (yet unsuccessfully) for someone’s head to roll.

You can bet your boots that if Joe the “plumber” had turned out to be everything he said, and an exemplary father, a red-blooded tax-paying American, a pillar of his community, and a savior of lost puppies, the Machine would have sat back on its laurels, smirking. Too bad for them, just the opposite happened.

Instead, he turned out to be a joke, and the Repugs’ knickers are all in a twist.

Wow! Counterfeit parts, counterfeit engineers. What’s next, counterfeit financial records. These airlines sure know how to cook the books, and cut costs. You know he got the job because he came cheaper than anyone else who was actually qualified. And yet those that hired him, aren’t the ones getting any jail time. Doesn’t Qantas share any responsibility for allowing just any Tom, Dick, or Harry with fake creds, to work for them? They’re a licensed carrier. Which means they have to prove they’re doing everything right to be in business. Or someone else better could step in a fill their shoes. But as I suspect, once any big corporate entity gets established, it becomes permanent regardless of how much they screw up. License re-approvals are just a formality.