Yellowknife (Sep 15/06) - There is little doubt the object pulled out of Long Lake last weekend by naval divers belongs to an airplane, but the question Yellowknifers are asking is: which one?

Andy Dupras, a resident for 49 years, was excited after hearing about the discovery, made last Friday. Some 45 years ago, the prospector had taken part in a search for a pair of young flyers who mysterious disappeared while joy riding around Yellowknife.

The disappearance of Frank Avery, Bob Markle and their small, two-seater Luscombe Silvaire is one the most enduring aviation mysteries of the North.

"They had communicated with the tower at the airport, and were three minutes from coming in," said Dupras, who would join a large search party organized shortly after Oct. 30, 1960, when the two men failed to return.

"They were just learning to fly."

Gerald Avery, brother of the lost pilot who was 22 at the time of the crash, said he would like to find closure to his brother's disappearance, but after hearing the description of the recovered plane section - a wing or tail piece measuring 12 to 15 feet in length - he doubts it was part of his brother's missing plane.

"It was just a small, little plane," said Avery.

Visiting naval divers, on a training exercise with Joint Task Force North - a division of the Canadian military - Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, found the plane part 20 meters from shore, shortly after entering the water.

It was dragged to shore on Sunday. Time and layers of freshwater mollusks have dulled its appearance. The aluminum shell is spotty and corroded.

Regardless, Avery said his brother's plane may very well be at the bottom of Long Lake. He certainly wasn't far from town when he went missing.

"They just went for a little flight," said Avery, recalling that there had been enough ice on Back Bay in late October to take off on skis.

"There was ice, and the were just flying around town, but they never came back. They certainly could've wound up in Long Lake. That's always a possibility."

He said pilot friends continue to search for the downed plane.

Merlyn Williams, a self-described aviation buff, thought the discovered plane piece was part of the tail of a British Avro York tanker, 11 of which were brought to Canada in the mid-1950s to fly freight to and from the DEW Line radar sites that dotted the high Arctic at the height of the Cold War.

Unfortunately, the 78-foot-long plane had a remarkably bad safety record; one crashed in Spitfire Lake, south of Great Slave Lake, and another went down in Hall Beach, Nunavut, said Williams.

According to a historical account of the aircraft, written by Tony Merton Jones, six of them crashed in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut during this period.

One of those Yorks crashed on take-off at the Yellowknife Airport in April, 1955, only a month after being declared ready for service.

There were no fatalities but the plane was declared a write-off, and most of it was buried at the sand pits, close to the airport. Williams wonders, however, if the plane's tail - for whatever reason, wasn't buried.

"They probably threw it in the lake," said Williams, based on his initial inspection of the recovered part earlier this week.

After taking another look at the airplane piece Wednesday, however, Williams was no longer so sure if it still belonged to an Avro York. The supports that would've attached to the rest of the plane didn't look quite right, he said, although he wouldn't rule it out.

Joe McBryan, owner of Buffalo Airways, has yet another theory, although he doesn't rule out Williams' assessment about the Avro York either.

"During the (Second World War) they had a brand new DC-3 crash at the airport here, and for years they used the cabin as a clubhouse at the golf course," said McBryan.

"But I bet you (the recovered part) is a wing off that DC-3. It used to be up on the shore there."

A spokesperson for the NWT Department of Transportation, which owns the airport, said his office doesn't know anything about the airplane part, but was planning to ask McBryan take a look at it anyway.

- with files from Jessica Gray