Monte, my memory of the many times the idea of taxiing to the beach has been raised is that the answer from those who have been on the island (Ric, et al.), is this. The putative "landing strip" is the stretch of reef north of the Norwich City out near the ocean edge of the reef. One of those TIGHARS visiting Niku is a very experienced airline pilot of large jets, and he has said positive things about the suitability of that area of the reef for landing the Electra, with its large balloon tires (that were intended, after all, for non-paved landing areas). For example, read
what Skeet Gifford said after Niku IV in 2001.
Notwithstanding that the current way of thinking tends toward there having been some kind of mishap with the left landing gear upon landing, those who've been there say that the portion of the reef surface from there to the beach is very rough and treacherous, marked with crevices and pools -- so many, in fact, that it's hard to make one's way on foot from the beach to the smooth reef-edge and back. As Ric wrote in the Forum back in 1999,
between this "runway" and the beach several hundred yards away, the coral is very jagged and pitted with large depressions.
Sounding a mite testy, Ric answered someone on the Forum in 2003 who also advanced the idea of simply pointing the plane at the beach and gunning it:
> What you're missing are the umpteen previous postings that have explained
> that the nature of the reef surface prohibits any taxiing to the shore.
> Only the first couple hundred feet of reef near the ocean is smooth enough to
> land or taxi on. Move any closer to shore and the reef becomes deeply pitted
> and jagged.
Then, the final impediment to "beaching" the Electra is that there is a river-like ditch that has been scoured out where the reef meets the sandy beach. It runs southward from the Northwest corner down into the lagoon via the Tatiman entrance. That further precludes maneuvering a plane up to the beach. This river-like ditch has a name and is described in
Ameliapedia under "boat channel".
Those reef and reef-beach-boundary conditions can be visualized by looking at the 2001 satellite photo that is used on Google Earth.