Heartbroken Horacio Sala said 'I can't believe it, this is a bad dream' after search crews discovered the aircraft two weeks after it vanished
EMILIANO Sala's dad has today revealed his agony after the plane carrying his son was found at the bottom of the English Channel.
The downed Piper Malibu was located near Alderney with state-of-the-art sonar kit that scoured the seabed.
Heartbroken Horacio Sala said today: "I can't believe it, this is a dream, a bad dream."
Footballer Sala’s missing plane was found after his family and footie stars including Lionel Messi raised £325,000 to launch a private search.
Experts believe it entered the English Channel in one piece, which may explain why it has been found so quickly yesterday.
Speaking to Cronica TV outside his home in Santa Fe, Argentina, his father said: "They told me that the days passed and there was no news of Emiliano or the plane."
I can not believe it...this is a dream...a bad dream...I'm desperate.
Emiliano Sala's dad Horacio
Bodies have not yet been recovered. The Air Accident Investigation Branch is expected to make a statement today.
Shipwreck hunter David Mearns last night said: “A plane carrying Emiliano Sala and piloted by Dave Ibbotson, 59, has been located by my crew.
"The families have been informed.
“This is about the best result we could expect for the families, but is devastating news.”
The plane was carrying Cardiff’s new £15million signing Sala, 28, to the city from former club Nantes when it vanished on January 21.
Mr Means used sonar technology to scan the seabed off Alderney in the Channel Islands.
Within a few hours boat FBV Morven picked up a signal and a remote-controlled submarine fitted with a camera was sent down to formally identify the wreckage.
On Wednesday, the AAIB said two seat cushions believed to be from the plane were found off Normandy.
This is about the best result we could expect for the families but is devastating news
Shipwreck hunter David Mearns
Football legend Diego Maradona also urged investigators to keep looking for his fellow Argentine after a search by Guernsey’s harbour master was called off on January 24.
An investigation is being conducted to find out if pilot David, 59, from Crowle, Lincs, had the correct qualifications to carry out commercial flights.
FOOTIE STARS AND FANS RAISED £325K FOR PRIVATE SEARCH
The wreckage of the aircraft was found yesterday morning by Mr Mearns, who directed a privately-funded search operation north of Guernsey on behalf of the Sala family.
Sala's plane vanished at around 8.30pm on January 21, with aviation experts claiming ice on the wings could have caused it to crash into the Channel.
The footie ace sent WhatsApp messages to his friends as the plane lurched in rough conditions, saying the plane “looks like it’s going to fall apart”.
He wrote: "Boys, I'm here on top of the plane that looks like it's about to fall apart. And I'm going to Cardiff, crazy, tomorrow we already started. In the afternoon we started to train, boys, in my new team.”
Sala later sent another message saying: “If you do not have any more news from in an hour and a half, I don’t know if they need to send someone to find me...I am getting scared!”
Married dad-of-three Mr Ibbotson, from Scunthorpe, told pals he was feeling 'a bit rusty' just days before the doomed aircraft vanished with the £15million football ace on board.
The plane had requested to descend then lost contact with Jersey air traffic control.
Football agent Willie McKay, who brokered the deal, said the incident had "been an absolute nightmare for us".
He said that if he had not allowed Sala to return to his old club to say goodbye to his former teammates and put his beloved dog Nala in kennels "he would still be with us".
Last week it was revealed how the agent's chosen pilot David Henderson, 60, subbed the job to Mr Ibbotson after asking: "Do you want to spend a weekend in Nantes?"
Argentinian striker Sala was signed by Cardiff for a club record £15million.
Fans paid tribute yesterday by laying scarfs, daffodils and caps ahead of their clash with Bournemouth, their first home game since Sala vanished. They won 2-0.
The shipwreck hunter who tracked down Emiliano Sala’s missing plane has solved more than TWENTY maritime mysteries.
Davied Mearns, known as “The Shipwreck Hunter”, used side-sonar technology to detect the wreckage of the doomed flight off Alderney, in the English Channel.
However, this is by no means his first successful hunt – the a UK-based marine scientist and oceanographer has set records by finding wrecks at extreme depths
Mr Mearns also lead a team that discovered the remains of HMS Hood as well as many other wrecks.
One of Britain's greatest battleships, Hood was torpedoed by the German navy's Bismarck in May 1941, killing 1,415 men.
Her remains were found at a depth of 3,000 metres in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland in 2001.
At the time Mr Mearns said he had the "deepest respect" for the wreckage and the team left a memorial plaque bearing each of the lost seamen's names at the site.
The American-born explorer has continued to make significant discoveries around the world with his company, Blue Water Recoveries.
In 2008 Mr Mearns led the successful search for HMAS Sydney, an Australian navy battlecruiser sunk by the Germans off the continent's west coast in November 1941, taking more than 700 lives.
And in 2015 his company announced they had found a wreck believed to be the Esmerelda, a ship from Vasco Da Gama's fleet thought to have sank off the coast of Oman in May 1503.
Mr Mearns has also coordinated searches for some more modern nautical enigmas.
In the early 1990s he assisted a criminal probe into the foundering of the Lucona, a cargo ship blown up in the Indian Ocean in 1997, killing six men, as part of an insurance scam.
He has also been instrumental in searches that have defied the odds.
They include locating the SS Rio Grande, the deepest shipwreck ever found.
The Second World War German supply ship, sunk by the Americans in 1944, was discovered around 3.5 miles below the waves of the south Atlantic in 1996.
There is one outstanding mystery that Mr Mearns still dream of solving - the location of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, which sank off Antarctica in 1914 after being crushed by ice.
He told The Times in 2017: "If I could cap it all off with Endurance, I would be a happy, happy man because it is the ultimate shipwreck search in terms of difficulty and challenge.
"Harder than Titanic. Finding a deep-water shipwreck in the Weddell Sea when it is covered in ice - you are not going to get any harder than that."
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