It’s 1942. A squadron of US warplanes is crossing the North Atlantic when a storm blows up out of nowhere. The pilots are forced to make a daring emergency landing on the Greenland ice cap. They escape with their lives, but their planes are buried in the advancing ice. Fifty years later a rich businessman decides to recover one of the planes and restore her to her former glory. It sounds like a story from a Boy’s Own comic-but it really happened. Now, 60 years after she last took to the air, one of the planes, a P-38 Lightning fighter called Glacier Girl, is almost ready to fly again.
Glacier Girl’s story began in July 1942 when a squadron of six P-38s and two B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from Presque Isle air base in Maine to join Operation Bolero, a massive build-up of US forces in Britain. The long flight required refuelling stops in Labrador, Greenland and Iceland. It was a perilous undertaking. In the Arctic, clear blue skies can turn into a white wall of snow and ice in seconds, and magnetic interference from the North Pole makes compasses spin uncontrollably and radio communication unreliable.
On 15 July the squadron left Greenland for Iceland with a forecast of good weather. An hour and a half from their destination they ran smack into a solid mass of storm clouds. The pilots were forced to turn back. For several hours they navigated by dead reckoning, unable to see land or clear sky.
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“At that point I was virtually out of gas,” says Brad McManus, one of the P-38 pilots. “I said: `I’m going in now while I still have control of the aeroplane’.” McManus landed on the ice with his wheels down. His plane flipped over and he was lucky to survive. The other P-38 pilots landed “belly down” with their wheels retracted, sliding their planes to a standstill.
The B-17s also landed safely and the navigators radioed for help. Seven days later the crews were rescued by a team on dog sleds. But they had to leave their planes behind and in time they were swallowed by the vast, ever-shifting ice sheet.
During the war, P-38s were dispensable: at the height of production, factories were making 16 a day. But by the late 1970s only a handful were still flying, and aircraft enthusiasts started thinking about retrieving one from Greenland. Between 1977 and 1988, nine expeditions went to look for the squadron. Only one found anything. In 1988, a team led by Pat Epps of Georgia-based Epps Aviation used low-frequency radar to locate a metallic object 75 metres under the ice. After drilling down, they identified it as a Flying Fortress. But it was too badly damaged to pull out.
Enter J. Roy Shoffner, a rich Kentucky businessman, ex-fighter pilot and aeroplane enthusiast. As a teenager during the war Shoffner had dreamed of flying a P-38. But by the time he was old enough to join the Air Force, the war was over and P-38s had been phased out. So when he read about the lost squadron in an aviation magazine, there was no question-he had to go to Greenland, dig one out and fix her up.
In 1992, Shoffner put a team together and headed for the ice cap. Using Epps’s data and photographs taken by Brad McManus in 1942, which showed the positions of the planes in relation to the mountains, the team estimated where the planes were likely to be. “The glacier moves by about a hundred feet a year so we were able to calculate their approximate location,” says Bob Cardin, project manager for the expedition.
Their goal was to bring out the last P-38 to land. McManus’s photos showed that this plane had sustained the least damage during the landing, which would make a big difference to the restoration cost.
The team used low-frequency radar to narrow their search area. They then used a steam probe-a high-pressure hot-water nozzle connected to 100 metres of reinforced hosepipe-to feel for the plane inside the ice cap. On the ninth attempt they finally hit it, 80 metres below the surface-the equivalent of a 25-storey building.
But before they could send someone down to the aircraft to assess her condition, they had to widen the probe hole. “The only practical way to get through the ice was to melt a tunnel, then enlarge a cavern around the aircraft,” says team member Don Brooks. They considered all sorts of methods, including diggers, a jet engine to melt the ice, even a plasma cutter. These would all work, but they were too heavy to transport all the way to Greenland.
So Brooks invented Super Gopher, a metal cone just over a metre in diameter and covered with coils of copper piping. The team pumped hot water through the pipes, and Super Gopher slowly melted its way down through the ice. It took more than three days to sink a shaft down to the plane.
Shoffner was the first to reach her. “My feet went through, I felt something metallic underneath, and I knew that was the aircraft.” Others then abseiled down the shaft to dig around the fighter’s frame. Working for a month in cramped conditions, they used ice picks and high-pressure hoses to blast a 15-metre cavern around the body of the plane.
Now they could get a really good look at her. “There was not one teaspoonful of rust,” says Shoffner, although the body had suffered considerable damage from the weight of the shifting ice. Amazingly, many of the buttons in the cockpit still worked. The levers moved freely and all the dials were intact except the compass and clock, which pilot Harry Smith had taken away as mementos. Smith’s checklist, manual and tobacco tin were still in the cockpit, and his flak helmet lay by the side of the plane.
Next, they took the plane apart piece by piece. Each component, no matter how badly damaged, had to be carefully removed, logged and hauled to the surface. Glacier Girl came out of the cavern the same way the team got in-through the gopher hole. The smaller parts they hoisted out by hand. For large sections like the twin tails, the wings and the 3-tonne fuselage, they had to widen the hole to five times its original width and use a grip hoist, which lifted the suspended part a half a centimetre for every pump of the lever.
Finally, after four months living in huts on the ice cap, the crew airlifted Glacier Girl off the glacier and took her to her new home in Middlesboro, Kentucky. Shoffner gathered restoration experts to help put her back together. The team cleaned and checked each part to see what could be saved. Since production of this model of P-38 stopped during the war, spare parts were scarce. Anything they couldn’t make good would have to be specially manufactured by referring to the original blueprints. Fortunately, most of the parts could be salvaged. “We were able to save 80 per cent of the plane,” says Cardin. “Even the tyres still had air in them and when we finally blow them up, we’ll put a little bit of the 1942 air back in.”
Rebuilding Glacier Girl has been the most ambitious aircraft restoration project ever attempted. “This was the first time an airplane had been completely taken apart, repaired and put together again,” Shoffner says. “No one had ever tried to restore a plane as badly damaged as Glacier Girl before.” Now, nearly 10 years after she was first glimpsed through the ice, Glacier Girl is almost fully restored.
So far the project has cost Shoffner $638,000, but he says it’s money well spent. On 6 September he fired up her engines for the first time, following instructions from the original pilot’s manual. “It was quite well preserved because it was kept in a plastic folder,” Shoffner says. “We had to dry it out and the staples had rusted away, but it was otherwise in good condition.” The engines fired up on the first try.
But Glacier Girl hasn’t taken off yet. That can’t happen until she gets an airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration. As soon as it arrives, Shoffner intends to fly her, first above her home base and later around the US air show circuit. This time, Glacier Girl will have the benefit of modern technology to make sure she doesn’t get lost. “The only new piece of equipment we’ll have in the cockpit is a global positioning system to tell us our location within 25 feet,” says Shoffner. “I’m not at all concerned about flying her.”
With the journey he’s got in mind, he’ll need all the confidence he can get. “We’re going to fly her to England along the original route.” he says. “It’s our goal to finish the mission she started in 1942.”
