Navy zeroes in on plane wreck

Sonar search: HMNZS Kiwi looks for wreckage off Amberley Beach. Picture / Simon Baker

Today, as Marian D'Eve should have been celebrating her 58th birthday, Navy divers will take their first look at the plane that claimed her life when it ploughed into the sea on Sunday.

Ms D'Eve and her 60-year-old husband, Russell Smith, were killed when their Cessna 182 crashed off the coast, north of Christchurch, on Sunday afternoon.

Their bodies and parts of the wreckage washed ashore on Monday morning at Leithfield Beach. Yesterday police found the rear seats, a front seat and a wing strut in the tide but the main fuselage has not been recovered.

Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Bill Sommer said a Navy ship, using sonar equipment, started searching for the fuselage on Monday night. It yesterday identified an object on the sea floor, roughly one nautical mile off the coast and 12m below the surface.

Mr Sommer said investigators were "reasonably confident" the object was the remainder of the plane and hoped to confirm that today.

"We are looking to get a dive team down onto what we hope is the wreckage. If we have enough visibility down there, we would like to get some very good quality pictures and video before we move it from the sea floor."

Mr Sommer said it was expected to be the end of the week before the wreckage could be pulled up. The images captured underwater would help investigators to start piecing together what happened.

All that is known so far is that the couple left a conference in Taupo on Sunday afternoon and stopped at Nelson Airport to refuel. They made contact with the Nelson tower at 1.45pm and were last seen on radar about a kilometre from where the plane is believed to have gone down.

It is not known why the couple never made it to the private airstrip on their Aylesbury property, but the weather conditions were not ideal.

The crash does not appear to have been witnessed by anyone, and the couple were not reported missing until the next morning.

Police have completed the post-mortem exams, but they will not say how the couple died or if they survived the initial impact of the crash.

Dr Smith was the founder of Pulse Data, a company known internationally for its Braille and speech technology for the blind.

Ms D'Eve was an early childhood education specialist and author of a handbook for teachers.

Tributes for the couple flowed in yesterday. Dr Smith was described as a man who "changed thousands of lives" and Ms D'Eve as an intelligent and caring woman.

Ms D'Eve had three grown children, one of whom worked with Dr Smith in Christchurch. The other two are believed to be flying home from the United States.