Channel Islands Airsearch and RNLI crews look for people whose lives are at risk

Members of Channel Island Airsearch (CIAS) were having a natter at the Guernsey Aero Club after a training session when the call came that their help was needed.

They had their plane in the air within minutes and the volunteers who run the service – civil servants, builders, a physiotherapist – spent days scouring the sea and coastline for the missing footballer Emiliano Sala and the pilot Dave Ibbotson before the search was called off on Thursday.

“Our ethos is simple,” said the chief officer, John Fitzgerald, whose “real” job is running a photography studio. “We look for people whose lives are at risk. We operate a 24-hour service, 365 days of the year.”

The search for Sala and Ibbotson, which began on Monday night, was a joint effort between professionals and volunteers. The Guernsey harbourmaster, David Barker, a former Royal Navy officer, headed the operation from the island’s emergency services control centre at the police station in St Peter Port. Both the UK and French coastguards sent aircraft to help.

But much of the search work was done by volunteers from CIAS and the lifeboat charity RNLI’s Guernsey and Alderney crews.

Speaking at the CIAS hangar as its plane returned from another search mission, Fitzgerald said it had been an exhausting and stressful week.

“We have 24 volunteers; 23 of us have been involved,” he said. Each flight lasted three to three and a half hours. Their single plane took off soon after first light and returned as night fell over the Channel Islands.

The area is notorious for strong tides, changeable weather, large seas and submerged reefs. The whole CIAS operation is funded by charitable donations and Fitzgerald estimated they had spent more than £15,000 on the search for the footballer and pilot. It costs about £160,000 a year to run the service.

Among the volunteers who were involved was Lisa Duggan, a civil servant who looks after parks and beaches. “Conditions were quite good, not too much whitewater and good visibility,” she said after finishing a fruitless three-hour shift as an observer. “We look out for items of interest, then drop down to a lower altitude and call the lifeboat out if we think we have seen something worth examining.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest RNLI crews from Alderney and Guernsey were involved in the search for Emiliano Sala and Dave Ibbotson. Photograph: RNLI/Handout/EPA

“We did see some debris, but it turned out to be fishing nets. We also saw what looked like white angular debris, but we think it might have been bags or sheeting.”

At the RNLI headquarters at St Peter Port harbour, the acting deputy lifeboat operations manager, Tony Pattimore, said search and rescue operations such as this relied heavily on volunteers.

The lifeboat Spirit of Guernsey was launched within minutes of the emergency call on Monday – the night was moonless, the sea conditions difficult – skippered by Danny Blake, who runs a building business. They put nine men on the boat – the usual number is seven, but they reckoned the more eyes the better – and searched all night.

Pattimore, a retired deputy harbourmaster and former merchant seaman, got home that first night at 5.30am. The lifeboat operations manager, Peter Gill, left a little earlier as he is a jurat (a judge of fact in the Guernsey royal court) and needed to look over legal papers before a case the next day.

“It’s vital that volunteers put themselves forward for these roles,” he said. “People do it on the basis that somebody’s got to do it. It’s also often passed down through families.”

There were frustrations. The Guernsey teams use the so-called “Manche grid” to plan their searches – the area they cover is broken into numbered squares. The UK coastguard does not use the same system.

The CIAS is about to take delivery of a new plane kitted out with much more sophisticated search equipment. That will come too late for Sala and Ibbotson.