Claims Amelia Earhart's plane found

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Seventy-three years after the aircraft flown by aviatrix Amelia Earhart went missing, the wreckage of a plane some claim is hers has been found in deep water 800 kilometres east of where she was last seen.

But claims that the Lockheed Electra – with the remains of two humans in it – is lying in the Solomon Seas, off the west coast of the island of Buka in Papua New Guinea, have provoked derision from professional Earhart hunters, who believe she got further.

"It is causing a lot of excitement here," journalist Stain Sawa, from PNG's National Broadcasting Corporation, said yesterday.

Although he has yet to see it himself, he says experts say the plane is an Electra, the type Earhart was flying when she disappeared. "The plane is still intact but is partly covered by coral reef."

The fate of the American celebrity flier and her navigator Fred Noonan has been an enduring mystery since they took off from Lae, in New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, for Howland Atoll, an uninhabited United States island 3000 kilometres southwest of Honolulu.

Some claim she fell into Japanese hands and was taken prisoner and killed as a spy, while others say she crashed on the island of Nikumaroro in Kiribati and died there.

Tighar, a foundation based in the US state of Delaware, has a contract with Discovery Television to explore Nikumaroro for Earhart, and claims it has found evidence.

Executive director Ric Gillespie said that while Buka would have been on the route Earhart flew, Tighar believed it could prove she got much further. "Someone finds an Earhart plane at least once a month," he said from Delaware.

The find at Buka, which is at the northern end of the province of Bougainville, has turned into a political drama with fears that an American group is trying to take as much of the plane as it can.

Local politicians have become involved and an expedition is to be mounted next month in a bid to confirm the identity of the plane.

It lies in waters up to 40 metres deep.

The Earhart mystery has had a tenuous New Zealand link.

In 1940, a British colonial ship, Viti, took 17 New Zealand soldiers and radio operators to the Gilbert Islands to act as coastwatchers. After dropping the men off, the ship went on to Nikumaroro, where they found two sets of human bones.

They packed them into a wooden sextant box. Back in Suva, a doctor concluded that one set must have belonged to a white man. They closed the box and the war went on.

The box has never been found but it has long been rumoured that it is in the vast attic at Government House, Suva.

As for the New Zealanders, October marks the 70th anniversary of their execution by Japanese soldiers on Tarawa atoll.

- © Fairfax NZ News