GRUBBY MONEY-GRABBER WHO LED SALA TO HIS DEATH
Henderson was motivated by cash when he hired pilot unfit for job
DAVID Henderson, a former RAF officer, was convicted of contributing to emiliano Sala’s death yesterday and is facing five years in jail for hiring a grossly unqualified pilot.
Henderson was found guilty at Cardiff Crown Court of endangering the safety of the aircraft which crashed, killing the Cardiff forward, 28, and pilot David Ibbotson, 59, in 2019.
The trial exposed Henderson’s shocking indifference to the death of both men, while the grubby haggling for cash in the hours leading up to the catastrophic flight which claimed Sala’s life said everything about the sordid background to the tragedy.
Henderson revealed in his text messages how much cash motivated him. ‘Can you ping me over £4k as a float?’ ‘You’re earning a fortune.’ ‘There’ll be an extra charge for flying at night.’ These were just a few of those he sent when Sala’s people called him, needing a plane in a hurry.
Henderson, 67, was charm personified with his tanned complexion, expensive navy suit and confident demeanour in the witness box. The trial revealed that he has clearly done very nicely out of the business of jetting footballers around. He was at his son’s wedding in Paris on the weekend Sala died.
But under cross-examination last Friday, the former RAF officer’s indifference to the human cost of his money-making became clear. When pilot Ibbotson, 59, crashed with Sala, 28, on board, Henderson did not even take the time to ring the man’s wife, Nora Ibbotson. ‘I had no number for her,’ he told the jury.
Instead, he was texting around friends, to cover his tracks about hiring an inadequate pilot. ‘Ibbo has crashed the Malibu and killed himself and VIP! Bloody disaster. There will be an enquiry,’ he told one. ‘Keep very quiet’ and ‘Questions may be asked about his flying’ were messages to others.
Henderson didn’t seem to see how bad this looked. Minutes after admitting his oversight with the pilot’s widow, he was striding confidently across the court’s public areas. His attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for Sala’s death entailed trying to present Ibbotson as a vastly experienced pilot and the flight’s ‘operator’. He was far from it.
Ibbotson, who lacked a commercial pilot’s licence, a rating to fly the plane or a qualification to fly at night, should have been nowhere near Sala. The court case revealed Ibbotson to be a shambolic figure, constantly prevaricating over getting his night-flight licence, pleading that the cost of a holiday in Australia had left him short of the cash for the necessary training.
But even when it came to flying in broad daylight, he was inadequate. ‘The Ibbotson experience was interesting! He was all over the place,’ said one of Henderson’s friends, who’d taken over the controls when co-piloting one flight with him.
The plane’s owner, Fay Keely, who had handed its management to Henderson, was alerted by the Civil Aviation Authority to how Ibbotson overshot a runway stopping position and illegally strayed outside of a flight path. Six months before the ill-fated Sala flight, Keely instructed Henderson to stop using Ibbotson. He flatly ignored her. On the outward flight to Nantes with Sala, there was already a hint that the plane had serious mechanical failings. Ibbotson told Henderson he had heard a ‘bang’. Hasty repairs were made after the Piper Malibu N264DB plane landed in France. When Ibbotson was preparing to fly Sala back to Cardiff from Nantes, Henderson was anxiously scouring weather websites from Paris to see what his man had in store on what should have been a 90-minute journey to Cardiff. Aware that Ibbotson lacked the basic skills to fly on autopilot in conditions of poor visibility, he suggested the pilot ‘blag’ flying on his instruments if he could not see through the mist.
‘Weather s***. Can you blag IFR (instrument flight rules)?’ he texted him. A follow-up text exposed his awareness that they were dicing with disaster.
‘Keep me aware of progress. Nerve-wracking.’
This huge gamble had been compounded by a request by Sala’s agent, Willie McKay, that the flight back from Nantes be delayed for an hour until 7pm. It meant they would be taking off in the dark.
Henderson quickly texted a reply to McKay to inform him that the re-scheduled flight time would incur extra cost.
‘There was discussion about what the extra charges are at Cardiff because he wanted them to return so late,’ he told the court.
Henderson tried to throw some of the mud on to McKay, declaring him so obsessed with getting a pilot at short notice that: ‘I don’t know if he would have cared’ about Ibbotson’s lack of qualifications.
McKay should have been nowhere near the Sala transfer, either. He was not registered as an agent with the FA or French authorities and was disqualified when registered bankrupt in 2015. Yet he was so integral to the logistics of the Argentine’s £20million move that he was bombarding Henderson with calls about planes.
There were six calls in seven days, each lasting less than a minute because McKay only issued instructions. ‘He was very insistent,’ Henderson said. When the crash occurred, Henderson stonewalled police with ‘no comment’ responses. He refused to be submitted to interview.
But in a devastating morning under cross-examination last Friday, his written statement was taken apart and he could not find answers.
The inquest into Sala’s death, scheduled for next February, will reveal that Henderson’s use of Ibbotson was only part of the scandal. An Air Accident Investigation Branch report has already found that Sala and the pilot were both suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning when the plane crashed into the english Channel, caused by a fault in the exhaust tailpipe that allowed the gas to enter the cabin through the heating system.
There was no carbon monoxide monitor in the plane. It would have cost £14 to install one.
It was put to Henderson in court that Sala had the right to know, on that January night nearly three years ago, that his pilot was not licensed to fly in the dark. ‘Possibly, yes,’ he said. ‘In hindsight, yes. But I wasn’t in direct contact with the passenger.’
Not once in a six-day trial did he mention that passenger by name.
Sala’s family are still looking for answers and said in a statement: ‘We hope the Civil Aviation Authority will ensure that illegal flights of this kind are stopped.’