PNG wreck could hold key to Earhart disappearance

A chance discovery in New Guinea in World War II may hold the key to an enduring aviation mystery.

Retired aircraft engineer David Billings, 78 with his gliders at home in Nambour, north of Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

A chance discovery in New Guinea by Australian soldiers in World War II may hold the key to one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries — what happened to ­renowned pilot Amelia Earhart — according to compelling evidence that has driven one Queensland man for almost 25 years.

David Billings, a 78-year-old pensioner from Nambour, north of Brisbane, has travelled to New Britain — an island in eastern Papua New Guinea — 16 times since the early 1990s, trying to find a plane wreck discovered by Australian soldiers on a patrol in 1945.

The Weekend Australian has obtained video interviews conducted with four of the soldiers from the patrol that discovered a large engine in the middle of dense jungle and took a metal plaque with identifying numbers as they continued on their way to base.

While the plaque has not been seen since and is presumed lost or buried in archives, a wartime map from the soldiers’ patrol was unearthed in the early 1990s. It contained details identifying Ear­hart’s plane: 600H/P S3H1 CN1055. CN1055 is the unique construction number of her plane, S3H1 was the model of her Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, and it was recorded the engines were capable of 600 horsepower.

“The factual evidence is there. How did those numbers get on a wartime map? They mean nothing unless you know what they are,” Mr Billings said.

“Earhart was an important contributor to aviation. Now we have evidence, we should find her plane.”

Mr Billings has been seeking private support for his searches for the past two decades, but has encountered resistance from Earhart researchers around the world who believe it is highly unlikely to be her plane.

There are several theories about what happened to Earhart, who took off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, in a bid to reach the remote Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were 35,000 kilometres into an attempt for her to become the first woman to fly around the world.

They disappeared en route and have never been found.

Some believe her ill-fated trip ended in the Marshall Islands, a chain of islands between Hawaii and the Philippines, while another group is convinced she crashed and was marooned on Nikuma­roro Island in the central Pacific.

Where's Amelia Earhart plane png

Last week, The Washington Post reported that the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery released details of radio distress calls heard in the days after Earhart disappeared to back the Nikumaroro Island theory that Earhart died a castaway.

A housewife in Toronto heard a shorter message, but it was no less dire: “We have taken in water … we can’t hold on much longer,” the TIGHAR report said.

It theorised that Earhart and Noonan had been marooned on an island and radioed for help at low tide so it wouldn’t flood the engine, which had to be started to run the radio. However, the tides began to rise, the plane was taken out into the ocean and the pair died as castaways.

What is not in dispute is that Earhart had travelled towards Howland Island for many hours on the day she disappeared and, according to her verified radio calls, believed she was close to her destination. Many, including Dorothy Cochrane, curator of general aviation at the Smith­sonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, believe she came down in the Pacific Ocean.

“I have no reason to believe otherwise,” she said. “We believe she is somewhere in the vicinity of Howland Island.”

New Britain, she said, was hundreds of kilometres too far for Earhart to have flown.

However, Mr Billings has trawled through the fuel calculations released by Lockheed in the 1930s. He has also combed weather reports from July 1937 and argues it is possible Earhart believed she had enough fuel to fly back to Rabaul, New Britain, but crashed into the jungle just as she was about to reach it.

Segments of the video interviews conducted with Donald Angwin, Ken Backhouse, Keith Nurse and Roy Walsh, some of which have are available on The Australian’s website, show four men who discovered what they at first thought was a Japanese gun in the New Britain jungles.

“It was a large aircraft engine, half covered in mud,” Mr Angwin said. Mr Backhouse, the lieutenant on the patrol, said: “There wasn’t much of it, all we could see on our side was a bit of wing. There was an engine there … I just jumped on the wing, had a glance inside what I thought was the cockpit.”

Mr Nurse said: “I considered the engine was very old. It certainly wasn’t a wartime military aircraft engine.”

Mr Billings plans to return to PNG soon and says he will keep searching.