Hopes rise metal debris from South Pacific will lead to Earhart's plane

Researchers on the trail of missing 1930s aviator Amelia Earhart say they are increasingly convinced that aluminium debris found on a South Pacific beach came from her lost plane.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) said the debris bolsters the possibility that a sonar blip off Nikumaroro atoll in Kiribati is the fuselage of her ill-starred Lockheed Electra.

Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo, was attempting to circumnavigate the world in 1937, when she and navigator Fred Noonan vanished without a trace.

In a statement, Tighar said the chunk of aluminium, found in 1991, strongly resembles a patch installed in place of a window on the Electra during a stopover in Florida earlier during the flight.

It also reinforces the possibility that an "unusual feature" seen in sonar images taken by a Tighar expedition to the atoll in 2012 might be Earhart's lost plane, 200 metres beneath the sea.

One theory, the researchers said, assumed that the patch was removed after Earhart and Noonan, possibly out of fuel, crash-landed on a reef at Nikumaroro and sent out radio messages for at least five days.