The owner of a light plane that crashed into the sea, killing the professional footballer Emiliano Sala, had ordered the pilot not to fly the aircraft, a jury has been told.
Fay Keely said she told the plane’s operator, David Henderson, that pilot David Ibbotson, who also died in the crash, should not fly the plane after she was notified of two airspace infringements he was involved in by the UK aviation regulator.
Keely told the jury at Cardiff crown court: “As far as I was concerned I had made my feelings clear that he shouldn’t be flying the aircraft.”
Henderson, 67, of Hotham, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, denies acting in a reckless or negligent manner likely to endanger the aircraft.
The court has been told that he arranged the fatal night-time flight though he knew that Ibbotson, 59, from Crowle, Lincolnshire, was not qualified to fly after dark and was not competent in bad weather.
The single-engine Piper Malibu aircraft was flying the 28-year-old Argentinian striker from Nantes in France to Wales, where he was to join Cardiff City FC. It crashed on 21 January 2019 north of Guernsey.
Keely said she bought the aircraft through her family’s company, Cool Flourish, under advice from Henderson in 2015, from which time he became the plane’s operator.
He was in charge of the maintenance and hiring out the plane, and choosing pilots, the jury was told.
Keely said on Wednesday that she emailed Henderson on 6 July 2018, saying Ibbotson should not fly the aircraft again after she was notified by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of two infringements that had happened while he was in the air.
She wrote: “I think it would be best if he was not asked to pilot the Malibu again. I appreciate this limits the available pilots but it does not give me much confidence in his care of the aircraft.”
But Henderson used Ibbotson a month later. Keely said: “Later on in the year, in August, he tried to contact me while I was on holiday. He was due to fly my sister on a trip and was going to be piloting himself.
“I found out after the event that he was unavailable and had asked David Ibbotson to fly instead of him.”
The court heard that later Henderson was not available to fly Sala as he was in Paris with his wife and asked Ibbotson to do the flights.
Jurors heard that Ibbotson did not hold a commercial pilot’s licence and that his rating to fly the Piper Malibu had expired.
Hours after the crash, Henderson messaged aircraft engineer David Smith telling him to “keep very quiet”, the court heard.
Smith, an employee of aircraft maintenance company Eastern Air Executive, said he had become aware of some issues with the aircraft on 21 January before it was due to fly back from France to the UK and insisted it was checked by a French engineer.
The trial continues.
