For nine months, Timothy McCormack worked as a senior engineer for Qantas, performing high level maintenance jobs on scores of planes and certifying dozens of others as air-worthy.

When he was exposed as a fraud in July last year, Mr McCormack, 27, admitted to a court that he had faked his qualifications to get his job, putting thousands of lives at risk.

But before sentencing, he produced four excellent character references to prove to the judge that he really was a person of quite outstanding character, and should receive a lighter sentence.

The references, which included one from a police officer, were almost too good to be true. Now the Sydney District court has discovered they really were too good to be true, and that Mr McCormack had falsified those references, too.

As Mr McCormack sank further and further in his seat in the dock, his head between his fists until only his hair was visible, Judge Mark Marien told the court that all four references were formatted in the same way and signed by the same hand.

Other basic errors in the references had made it easy for the prosecution to prove them to be false. One, written by a fictional school counsellor, had misspelt counsellor as 'councilor'.

Senior Sergeant Woodwood, president of Hornsby Junior Australian Rules Football Club who proffered a glowing refence describing Mr McCormack as "the fairest and the best" didn't exist. Nor, of course, did the club.

Judge Marien described Mr McCormack's attempts to get off sentencing as "an extroardinary event."

Mr McCormack, 27, had pleaded guilty to 42 charges of falsifying documents, including his exam results for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority's (CASA) aircraft maintenance engineer licence and his engineering credentials.

With one basic CASA exam under his belt, giving him only the most basic knowledge of aircraft engineering, Mr McCormack was employed by Qantas in 2004 in the relatively junior role of an aircraft maintenance engineer. All his work had to be approved by a licensed engineer.

Two years later, after presenting his supervisors with fake exam results he was promoted to the senior role of Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer, which gave him the authority to overseeing maintenance works and certify the safety of aircraft.

In fact, he never passed any additional exams but had altered a colleague's engineer's licence on his home computer before passing it off as his own.

For the next 10 months, his forgery - and his lack of expertise - went unnoticed and he performed nearly 2000 maintenance jobs on 88 Qantas 747/400 planes, frequently used for long haul flights. He also certified as safe dozens of other planes. In all, around 12000 passengers flew in planes that he had worked on or certified as safe, despite his scant knowledge of how they worked.

It was only in in April last year, when his supervisors checked his qualifications and found that he wasn't listed as a licensed engineer that his secret life began to unravel.

Now Mr McCormack is facing additional charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Sentencing has been adjourned for psychiatric tests.

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