Cardiff City expressed “grave concerns” over the Emilliano Sala crash report after investigators confirmed neither the pilot nor the single engined aircraft were licensed for commercial use.
The club, which is considering a negligence claim over the circumstances surrounding the death, said findings by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch suggest the trip may been “unlawful”.
The AAIB report confirms the mystery owner of the plane made no attempts to apply to either American or British authorities for commercial use, while Dave Ibbotson, the part-time gas engineers who was at the controls of the Piper Malibu on Jan 21, had only a private licence.
Cardiff said in a statement that they have “grave concerns that questions still remain over the validity of the pilot’s licence and rating to undertake such a journey, as identified in the bulletin”.
Investigators are still establishing whether the doomed flight took place on a “cost sharing” basis, which does not breach Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) guidelines. However, a club spokesman added: “We are also concerned to discover that the trip involved an aircraft which did not conform to either UK CAA or US FAA requirements for commercial activity and therefore may have been operating unlawfully.
We welcome further investigation into the accident, which is required to determine precisely what happened, and to ensure changes are made so that this situation never happens again.”
The report confirmed on Monday how the US-registered Piper Malibu N264DB, unlicensed for commercial flying, fell thousands of feet in the space of 20 seconds after making a 180-degree turn, minutes after Ibbotson requested a descent. Wreckage was found on the seabed 30 metres from where final radar readings located it at an altitude of 1,600ft (488m), suggesting it had dropped almost vertically in its final moments, the interim report found.
About 15 minutes before the crash took place at 8.16pm on Jan 21, an air traffic controller had asked Ibbotson, a part-time gas engineer, whether he needed to drop further in altitude, apparently to avoid cloud and maintain vision. The pilot replied: “Negative, just avoided a patch there, but back on heading five thousand feet.” The plane then “climbed rapidly” to about 2,300 ft before it crashed into the sea breaking into three pieces at around 8.16pm on Jan 21.
Both Nantes and Cardiff had been hoping the report would help clear up a simmering legal law over whether the Welsh club should pay the French team the full transfer fee amount.
Last week it disclosed how Sala signed a potentially invalid contract with Cardiff in the days before he died. Lawyers working on behalf of England’s top tier have written to the Welsh club confirming their record signing was not fully registered to play in the competition last month.
The aircraft, which was built in 1984, is registered in the United States rather than Britain and its papers are held by a company based in Norfolk, Southern Aircraft Consultancy. The AAIB recognised it still a number of issues to clear up in its investigations. Geraint Herbert, the principal investigator, added: “The Air Accidents Investigation Branch will now analyse the evidence we have to try and build a picture of what happened between the last radar contact we have with the aircraft and when it came to rest on the seabed, to try and determine why the accident happened.”
Ibbotson, who had previously written on Facebook that he was “rusty”, had reportedly filled out forms incorrectly before take off. On one he had reportedly written N246DB instead of N264DB, and was only qualified to fly at night if conditions were clear without any bad weather.