A long read, but a good story.
Posted on 02/27/2010 1:52:27 PM PST by caveat emptor
The journey on which the world’s most famous fighter airplane [was recovered from beneath 268 feet of ice on Greenland's ice cap]. Great Britain was holding off Nazi Germany and the United States was rushing warplanes to British airfields. In 1942, Glacier Girl was a brand new Lockheed P-38F, one of hundreds of airplanes sent as part of U.S. Army Air Force had its pilots base-hop across the North Atlantic from Maine to Scotland. Not all squadrons made it across, and this particular one was forced down by weather to an emergency landing on an ice cap in Greenland. For Glacier Girl, that was leg one.
Using a steam probe, an eight-foot-long steel rod trailing 300 feet of steel-reinforced rubber hose, the team located the airplane. They ran 264 feet of one-inch steel pipe down the hole made by the probe and erected an I-beam truss on the surface above. From the truss, a cone-shaped heater with a hole in the center—the Super Gopher—was lowered by an electric winch at he rate of two to four feet per hour. Guided by the pipe, it melted a shaft four feet in diameter. A bilge pump removed the meltwater.
Using a hot-water cannon, the crew carved out a 50-food-wide cavern around the P-38, which they took apart and sent piece by piece to the surface. They had to sink five shafts to excavate a hole wide enough to lift the last piece of the airplane, the 17-foot-long, three-ton center section. It came up on August 1, 1992, three months after the expedition had begun.
For the story of Glacier Girl’s restoration and first flight, see Air & Space/Smithsonian, March 2004......
The glaciers have all been melting away this century. How did it get covered with 268 feet of ice? /s
Thats what we said back when we dug it out in 92.
I work across from the hanger where she was restored. Each day when the hanger doors were open you could look across the runway and see the progress they were making on the old girl.
Got to watch her take off on her maiden flight, that was sweet!!! Saw her fly in and out a few times. It was a sad day when I watched her fly out for the final time.
You people are just hallucinating that ice. Everyone knows that Greenland is close to spontaneously combusting. lol
It sounds like a great project. It must have been neat to watch it come together.
Which neatly explains the deep ice.
Ah, yes, I forgot all about that. And they persisted in their evil in the ‘90s and made ketchup a main dish in school lunches. Somehow Jean sKerry must have had a hand in that too.
The AAF logo they found on the wings likely stood for “Amelekite Air Force”. According to standard theories, it would take about 3500 years for that much ice and snow to get put down over the plane, i.e. the thing has to date from the time of Moses, and the only nation organized enough to build such a thing at that time would have been the Amalekites...
Yeah, their dating for the age of the earth is just as accurate.
Hence the name greenland.
I’ve watched it fly at the EAA Airventure in Oskosh. It’s a thrill to see such wonderful aircraft take to the skies.
I read the story about it. Also watched a video of reclaiming a B29 from Greenland ice.
Saw that part too ... they sat in lawn chairs and watched it burn.
It was in Alaska. Greenland was a stop for aircraft going to the European Theatre. Alaska was a stopover for aircraft going to the Pacific Theatre.
B-29s only fought in the Pacific (with the exception of two B29s that flew through Europe, on their way to India, to scare Hitler.)
Ok, I knew that B29’s were used exclusively in the Pacific but the way it looked from the video I could have sworn that they mentioned Greenland - which to me was an oddity - however, didn’t some B29’s go to England after WWII at the start of the Cold War????
It was a stupid thing to do - and after all that work and that guy dying ....
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