DIVERS are searching off the coast off Herne Bay in a fresh bid to locate the wreckage of the plane used by pioneering airwoman Amy Johnson.

It is the second time the team from the RAF Sub-Aqua Association has visited the site in a project expected to go into next year.

Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo the 11,000 miles to Australia in 1930 at the controls of a single engine Gypsy Moth craft. But it was on a routine flight in January 1941 with the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft from factories to RAF bases during the Second World War, that she crashed into the Thames Estuary and died. Neither her body or the plane were ever found.

For the past year members of the Canterbury Sub Aqua Club have also been scouring the seabed 12-15 miles north-east of Herne Bay following information unearthed by journalist and author Midge Gillies, whose biography on the pilot comes out next year, on the centenary of Johnson's birth.