[Patrick]

I've heard discussions pertaining to and actually been asked essentially how to Parker P-51 a logbook. I've heard comments ranging from taxing the aircraft around to leaving the country for a year and miraculously coming back with an extra 1000 hours to sitting in the jumpseat on an airliner and logging that time. I have no doubt that there are others.

What is really comes down to, to me, is that it's going to be pretty obvious (unless you're the next Buzz Aldrin) that if you put down 1000 hours of total flight time on an application, yet you only have 300, and you then get selected for an interview, that between the interview and the sim session it's going to be glaringly obvious that you don't have the experience that comes with 1000 hours. For this reason, I would agree that one could conceivably get away with pencil whipping an extra 10% of flight time in there, but for the little difference that would make, why bother?

As to the idea of using flight aware to verify flight times, I think that would highly depend upon the type of flight time that one was looking to verify. Any VFR flight training will not show up on flight aware, so that doesn't work. If one is looking to verify flight time at a previous 121 or 135 opertation, it is far easier to simply ask the previous company than to run the various tail #'s of aircraft that the applicant claims to have flown. Now yes, if in the previous 3 weeks to an interview an applicant claims to have flown 50 hours of cross country time in a twin, and one twin at that, that could easily be checked.