A joint British and Myanmar team on Wednesday began an excavation for 54 Spitfire fighter planes reportedly buried in Myanmar after the end of World War II.
Digging started at Mingaladon on the northern outskirts of Yangon for the remains of 30 Spitfires that may have been buried there shortly after the end of the war, said the British team leader David Cundall.
The site was a military airport during World War II used first by the Japanese and then the British forces.
Cundall said another 18 Spitfires were buried in Myitkyinar, capital of the northern state of Kachin, and six more in Meikthila, near Mandalay, 600 kilometres north of Yangon.
"I am very confident that we will find answers to the story of what happened here in 1945," Cundall told a press conference.
The British fighters were thought to have been buried in Myanmar, rather than transported home.
Cundall, who cites witnesses saying they saw the Spitfires being buried in wooden crates at the three sites, first travelled to Myanmar in 1998 to hunt for the British planes.
"I didn't find anything because I got the wrong end of the runway," Cundall said of his first dig in Mingaladon.
In October, he signed a deal with Myanmar's Shwe Taung Por Company (STP) and the government to continue his search.
Under the agreement, if the team is successful the government will get 50 per cent of any profits, Cundall's team 30 per cent and STP 20 per cent, STP's managing director Htoo Htoo Zaw said.
The British team included Stanley Coombe, 91, one of the alleged witnesses to the planes' burial.
"Nobody believed what I said," Coombe told the press conference. "It only when David Cundall came along that anyone believed my story. This is going to be a big, big exciting thing to do."
Cundall said he became convinced that the Spitfires had been buried after he met two US veterans of the Myanmar campaign in 1996 who claimed to have witnessed their burial at the end of Mingaladon runway.
"If this project is a success, Myanmar and Britain will firm up their relationship, and Myanmar will become better known by the world," Htoo Htoo Zaw said.
Myanmar, formerly called Burma, was under British colonial rule until independence in 1948.