While I agree with TIGHAR's going hypothesis that AE/FN landed near the NC, my backup has been that they either landed or crashed near the Seven Site, and never left. There is a lengthy thread on this, somewhere.
To me, there's a strange disconnect between landing on the West side, and camping on the NE side...because there aren't many obvious advantages to leaving the first for the second, while there are several disadvantages. In brief:
Advantage: Rick says that there is a constant breeze blowing on the NE tip, and that our castaways would have sought to get away from the sweltering West.
Neutral: Some have speculated that the narrowness of the land at the Seven Site would have allowed them to observe more of the surrounding sea, and to easily be able to traverse between ocean beach and the lagoon. But a quick look at the grid map shows that the Seven Site isn't the narrowest area, that's a few 100 yards further East. For that matter, the eastern tip of the island, where they would have had a sweeping view of the sea (after all, the CG station was posted there later) was nearby, so if those were the attributes they were looking for, why travel all the way from the West, and then stop a few 100 yards from your ideal location?
Disadvantages:
A) Why leave the most famous "landmark": a 12 year old shipwreck? It would seem natural that it would grab the attention of any scouts to the island, whether by air or sea. Why forsake that for some indistinguishable spot in shrubbery on the opposite side?
B) Why leave a spot that would offer at least some shelter, and perhaps rudimentary supplies of some sort? The NC was a burned out hulk, but there was still a shell there that could have offered some protection from animals and the elements. Instead, they supposedly exchanged this for the Seven Site, which had millipedes and crabs that were so aggressive, the castaways had to build a ring of fires around themselves for protection.
C) Given that the ships guts were spilled out all over the west side, (as Tom describes in his fictional story of local boys who go to visit), surely this had a least some kind of opportunity to use something as a spear or blade or eating utensil or...anything. Instead, they decided to forsake any resources here and carry the few items they did have from the plane over a mile away to the Seven Site. And they did this with one or both of them hurt (according to our going theory).
D) The human factor: as someone mentioned above, it would seem unlikely for them to leave the one evidence of human civilization-no matter how forlorn its condition-so they could go camp out in bushes a mile away.
What underscores all of this is that people need a compelling reason to move from Point A to Point B. Especially if Point B is well away from Point A. Perhaps they landed on the westside, and then were on a recon around the island until the came to the Seven Site and stopped because of physical injuries that prevented them going any further. That's plausible. But then why bring their handful of items (like the box) along with them for the recon?
For that matter, is there anything at all that connects the two sites? Is there any physical evidence in hand of AE/FN or the Electra on any other part of the island? It sounds like it's hard to say definitively...originally there was thought to be the heel of a woman's shoe on the South side, but I don't think that is cannon any more. There were scraps of metal and I think roofing material (?) found at the Seven Site and used for cooking, that was thought to maybe come from the West, but was that from the plantation, or from the village which post-dates AE and FN? For that matter, how do we know AE/FN used those, instead of the CG or the magistrate?
If we take all that TIGHAR has found and theorized about over the years, all the tremendous work that they did, and categorize it according to levels of relative certainty, I think at the center you have to put the bones and likely personal affects of AE and FN, as found at the Seven Site. That's a bullseye, because the find is unimpeachably documented, the materials have been tested as likely to be a match, and because any alternative explanation would be more stranger than that of it being AE/FN. So to me that's concrete. I also believe in TIGHAR's theory of traveling on a positioning line...I find it very compelling. So that's our inner circle of concrete evidence and ironclad theory.
The next concentric circle would have to be the radio messages. I think Ric has made a case here...but it's not as concrete as the "bullseye" material, and even if it were true, it doesn't by itself show anything more than they were alive in a plane in rough surf for up to three days...i.e., even if there were radio messages, it's easy to have widely different interpretations of the messages themselves.
The third concentric circle is everything else...a whole mass of things ranging from an object in an old photo to the recollections of villagers many decades after the fact. Any of these could be true, but they are definitely on the outer edge of what we can take seriously.
And so there you have it: TIGHAR has built a strong case that AE/FN made it to Niku, and spent some amount of time at the Seven Site. And that's all anyone can say for sure. Based on that, you could easily say that they crashed or landed on the NE side, and camped within yards of where they emerged on the beach.
I would point out that every single one of the personal artifacts found can float. For all the world, they could have swam for shore, picked an item or two out of the surf, and collapsed in the bush. And that would explain why the Seven Site has so little in personal artififacts.
So that's my backup theory to our going hypothesis. Sorry for the long post.