"For nearly 60 years the mangled body of New Zealand pilot Arthur Round lay strewn across an Icelandic glacier, out of reach of relatives and friends.

The discovery last year of the wreckage of his Fairey Battle plane and well-preserved human remains came too late for his parents, two sisters and two brothers, who all died carrying the burden of Flight Officer Round's fate.

But the New Zealand Herald, alerted to the discovery by a Scottish journalist, has located surviving friends and relatives, who are elated at plans to retrieve the remains and give him a dignified burial.

A Royal Air Force expedition next month aims to recover Flight Officer Round's body from the glacier and those of the three British airmen who died with him. Efforts are now being made to have the New Zealander's family represented at a special burial service in Reykjavik.

Flight Officer Arthur Kavhan Round, No 36201, was one of three flying brothers who left the close-knit farming community of Newlands, Wellington, to fight in the Second World War. Only one came back, devastating their parents David, a pig farmer, and Mary, a baker.

An RAF spokeswoman says Flight Officer Round was on a non-operational flight with his sidekick, Flight Sergeant Reginald Hopkins, when he died in a whiteout in May 1941. They were taking two other British airmen to the southern port of Kaldrananes when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Akureyri in northern Iceland.

A niece, Aillen Jones of Featherston, recalls her grandmother being terribly affected by news of his death and by the loss of a second son, Heathcote, whose plane burst into flames on landing in England in 1944.

"I remember my grandmother got a medal from the King after Arthur's death and she sent it back. She didn't want it."

The broken-hearted parents died within a few years of one another in the mid-1950s, after shifting to Palmerston North.

For other relatives and friends, the find has rekindled memories of the "real gentleman" they grew up with in the 1930s.

"It has always been there in the back of my mind about Arthur and that he did not have a proper burial," says family friend Margaret Cornwell (nee Watkins).

She remembers him taking her and her sister for their first flights as a farewell gift before embarkation. In a Tiger Moth, he circled their dairy farm and his parents' neighbouring pig farm.

"We got home and my mother was that pale to think her daughters were up in the air," says Mrs Cornwell.

Her sister, Dorothy Duncan, has preserved the newspaper clippings she kept of the dark-haired young pilot whom she remembers as a real gentleman.

"He was a very nice guy and very sociable - very good-looking and quite tall. He held himself very straight," she says.

Flight Officer Round's service record shows he made the first XV at Wellington Technical College and was good at tennis, cricket, swimming and rowing.

A former traffic officer, he learned to fly with the Wellington Aero Club in 1938 before attending the Air Force training school at Wigram.

Stationed at first in France, then in Iceland, his service record states he flew "a large number" of reconnaissance missions, anti-submarine, shipping and convoy patrols and sea searches.

Mrs Duncan says the community were given few details about his death.

"We were led to believe they had been out chasing the Bismarck before they crashed in Iceland. He was killed very, very early in the war."

The youngest of the flying Round brothers, Ron, was the only one to survive the war, serving as a bombardier and navigator in the Canadian Air Force. He died in 1984.

Son Clive, of Palmerston North, has kept Arthur's early wartime letters to Ron outlining his escapades in 1939 and 1940. They tell of close encounters with French women, drinking sessions and "living for today - to hell with tomorrow."

"You don't read one-hundredth of the true facts in the papers," a September 1939 letter says. "The losses are much greater than you would expect. Still, let's forget about it."

One who did not forget was Horour Giersson, a historian at Iceland's Akureyri museum, who 20 years ago became fascinated by the whereabouts of the Fairey Battle aircraft.

Records of the plane's location were lost when the British left at the end of the war. Mr Giersson made more than a dozen trips to the area over the years.

But the discovery last year of the original search party's report, with map grid references, made the possibility of finding the plane more realistic. A friend stumbled on a copy of the report at the Public Records Office in London early last year.

"Last August we went up again, literally heading for a cross marked on an old map," Mr Giersson said. "Although I had been looking for it for so long, there was no feeling of gladness when we finally found the plane.""

New Zealand Herald - July 10th 2000, by Geoff Cumming.