[caveat emptor]

The following story, originally published in the January 1993 issue of Air & Space/ Smithsonian, recounts adventures during the second leg of the journey, a 22-year slog through recovery and restoration that couldn’t have been completed without the ingenuity, stamina, and fortune of a Roy Shoffner, a Kentucky businessman, named the P-38 “Glacier Girl” and began to plan the completion of its mission.

.....How They Did It

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......

[caveat emptor]

A long read, but a good story.

[TigersEye]

The glaciers have all been melting away this century. How did it get covered with 268 feet of ice? /s

[wendy1946]

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...

[SunkenCiv]

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