...What would be the most likely utimate destiny of the air frame post hostilities? ie Never available for local salvage, available for local salvage for some period of time until dumped at sea, bulldozed/buried, fully available for local salvage at any time?
Interesting question Doug. In January 1955 National Geographic ran an article titled;
"Air Age Brings Life to Canton Island: Planes Spanning the South Pacific Transform an Uninhabited Mid-ocean Coral Reef into a Busy Base,"
Part of the text reads;
"...burning of wartime eyesores affords fire-fighting practice and improves Canton's landscape. But ugly reminders remain:
old plane wrecks, junk piles of rusting military equipment, snapped-off wireless poles, grown-over artillery posts and ammunition storage bunkers, hundreds of useless fuel drums, abandoned buildings plundered for lumber..."
Nikumaroro settlers were employed on Canton Island following the war, and most likely were working there at the time this article was published. It makes sense to believe they brought the B-24 parts and maybe other odds and ends found on Nikumaroro back from Canton Island's trash heaps.
See
http://tighar.org/wiki/Niku_IIII_(2001)
"...Divers and waders examined and metal-detected the shallows of the northern lagoon... A truck wheel and tire were recorded, and a stainless steel exhaust manifold of a B-24 was recovered. Both are interpreted as trash from the later colonial village period; the Loran Station was equipped with a truck, and we have found other B-24 parts in the village, probably from a crash site on Canton Island, where some of the Nikumaroro colonists were employed in the 1940s and 50s."