October 29 – The businessman who organised the flight that crashed into the English channel and killed Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala on his way to sign for Cardiff City from Nantes in France has been found guilty of endangering the safety of an aircraft.
The small private plane carrying 28-year-old Sala and pilot David Ibbotson crashed on January 21, 2019. An unsavoury dispute over who was liable for Sala’s €17 million transfer fee to Cardiff has dragged on ever since.
Sala’s body was recovered in the plane’s wreckage, around a month after the accident, at a depth of 67 metres. The body of the 59-year-old pilot has never been found.
David Henderson, 67, was accused of failing to follow safety regulations, which resulted in the death of both Sala and Ibbotson. He was convicted by a majority verdict of 10 to two by a jury at Cardiff crown court on Thursday.
It took the jury of seven men and five women seven-and-a-half hours to convict Henderson, the aircraft operator, who the court heard had organised the flight with the football agent Willie McKay.
Henderson, who was on holiday with his wife in Paris at the time, had asked Ibbotson to fly the plane. Ibbotson regularly flew for him but did not hold a commercial pilot’s licence, a qualification to fly at night, and his rating to fly the single-engine Piper Malibu had expired.
The jury heard how moments after finding out the plane had gone down, Henderson, a former RAF officer, texted a number of people telling them to stay silent warning it would “open a can of worms”.
Prosecutor Martin Goudie QC said he had been “reckless or negligent” in his operation of the plane and that he put his business above the safety of passengers by using an authorised plane and hiring pilots who were not qualified or competent to fly them.
Goudie previously told the court that Henderson had breached numerous regulations as he attempted to transport Sala to Cardiff, adding the businessman ran an “incompetent, undocumented, risk creating and dishonest” organisation.
Henderson, who was granted bail, will return to be sentenced on November 12 when he will face a prison sentence of several years.
Sala’s family welcomed the conviction but said they still have unanswered questions about his death. An inquest is due to start in February next year.
Daniel Machover, of Hickman & Rose solicitors, said: “The actions of David Henderson are only one piece in the puzzle of how the plane David Ibbotson was illegally flying came to crash into the sea on 21 January 2019.
“We still do not know the key information about the maintenance history of the aircraft and all the factors behind the carbon monoxide poisoning revealed in August 2019 by AAIB.
“The answers to these questions can only be properly established at Emiliano’s inquest.”
“The Sala family fervently hope that everyone involved in the inquest will provide full disclosure of material without further delay.”
“Only if that happens will Emiliano’s family finally know the truth about this tragedy enabling all the lessons to be learned, so that no family goes through a similar preventable death.”
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