Posted on 10/28/2002 3:56:52 PM PST by ZGuy
Harrogate man spent millions to rescue P-38
MIDDLESBORO Ky. - Glacier Girl, part of a breed of celebrated World War II fighters that was resurrected from a Greenland ice cap like a frozen Madonna from the 1940s, will fly again Saturday.
At least, that is the hope and prayers of those who have labored since 1992 to restore the Lockheed P-38 Lightning F to its pristine 1942 fighting trim. The plane was at that time the nation's latest technology in combat aircraft versatility with her twin engines and twin-boom tail design, the Lightning was known to the Germans as "der gabelschwanz teufel"- the forked-tailed devil - and to the Japanese as "two airplanes with one pilot."
Saturday's flight will be the fighter's first since 1942, when she went down, out of fuel, on a historic trip from Maine to England. She will be flown by Californian Steve Hinton, one of the most experienced war bird pilots in the nation. Hinton, who has 235 hours of flying time in a P-38, was a pilot and aerial coordinator for the movie, "Pearl Harbor."
Glacier Girl's return to the wild blue yonder will bring tears to the eyes of some, flashback memories of six decades past to others and huge smiles to the faces of J. Roy Shoffner, the Harrogate entrepreneur who financed the decade-long recovery and restoration, and Bob Cardin, director of the project.
A crowd of more than 20,000 is expected to jam the Middlesboro, Ky., Airport to watch the 30-minute flight, set to begin about 2:20 p.m. after a brief opening ceremony to be attended by Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton. Hinton is expected to make two or three passes with Glacier Girl over the airfield before landing the aircraft, the only one of its kind flying in the world.
The airport will be closed to other aircraft from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. to give Glacier Girl all the room she needs for her re-incarnation flight.
The Lightning fought the Axis Powers in the Mediterranean and in both the European and Pacific theaters of war. Although she was not quite as nimble as Germany's Messerschmitt 109 or 110 or Japan's Mitsubishi Zero, with her 1,300-horsepower Allison engines she could fly more than 400 miles per hour, giving her the edge in air combat. Her range was extended by auxiliary fuel tanks, permitting her to fly long and dangerous missions.
The P-38 also carried an awesome array of weaponry: 20 mm nose cannon, supplemented by four .50-caliber machine guns. She was heavily armored, one of the first metal crafts manufactured when the U.S. began shifting from fabric-skinned war birds to sheet metal.
Aircraft historians believe there are at best only a half-dozen P-38s remaining and still flying, but the Glacier Girl is the only F model in existence and capable of flight.
The story of the Glacier Girl is the story of "The Lost Squadron," stuff of legend and Hollywood.
On Tuesday, July 7, 1942, eight P-38s and two B-17 Flying Fortresses left Presque Isle, Maine, for Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada. They were to make refueling stops in Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland before flying on to Prestwick, Scotland, then to England for combat in the skies over Europe.
The Lost Squadron never made it to Scotland's western coast.
The flight was to land at military bases on Greenland named Bluie West 8 and Bluie West 1. The group of 10 planes landed at Bluie West 8 on July 11. Four days later, at 3 a.m., the squadron was given approval to take off for Iceland. Within 30 minutes of takeoff, the pilots knew that trouble was afoot. They were in a thick soup and could no longer see land. They climbed to higher altitudes to get above the mess, but never broke free of the thickening clouds.
The bombers radioed Reykjavik, Iceland, hoping the weather would be better there. It wasn't. In fact, a message in military code came back, saying that Reykjavik was closed. The bombers then plotted a return course to Greenland's Bluie West 1 on the western coastline. Still in the soup, the squadron finally broke through after an hour or so, and discovered they were nowhere near Bluie West 1. All they could see below was the icecap.
Lt. Brad McManus, then only 24 years old, dropped low in his P-38. He had maybe 10 minutes left in his fuel tanks. Although the pilots had been briefed before leaving Labrador about landing on ice, it had never been done before.
With just seconds of flying power left in his emptying fuel tanks, McManus decided to go in first. He landed with wheels down at 100 miles per hour, skidded maybe 150 feet before the nose wheel bit into the summer-softened snow pack, and flipped upside down.
"I guess I got about half the length of a football field before the nose gear embedded. And she flopped over." said McManus, 84, from his office in Philadelphia.
The other pilots saw what had happened to McManus and decided they would land with wheels up. They came in, one by one, landing and skidding white trenches across the icepack.
Lt. Harry Smith, however, feathered the props on his P-38, which he was going to name "Sweet Pea," the abandoned baby in the popular Popeye cartoon of the era.
By feathering the props, he kept the engines from being badly damaged, saving the plane for another day of flight and combat.
After the rescue, the men were all reassigned and one year later, McManus was with the 364th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force flying P-38 escort duty for B-17s. He flew more than 85 missions and recorded three kills, just two shy of becoming an air ace.
Glacier Girl is actually the original plane named "Sweet Pea." Hearing the story of the Lost Squadron, several teams, from 1977 to 1992, attempted to locate and then rescue some of the warplanes.
Shoffner, an Air Force fighter pilot in the 1950s, who later made a fortune as an entrepreneur in Middlesboro and Harrogate, has always had a love affair with the P-38. When he learned of the Lost Squadron and the many attempts to retrieve the planes, he decided to give it a go.
In 1992, he put together a group that made it to the ice pack, found Smith's plane some 268 feet below the ice-packed surface of Greenland.
He used a hot-water device to melt a 48-foot-wide tunnel from the ice's surface to the plane. From there, "cold mine" workers sprayed hot water to excavate a blue-cold cavern around the aircraft. The workers then dropped down through the portal to dismantle the ice-locked plane, and bring her up, piece by piece, to the surface.
"It was like sliding down a soda straw into a block of ice," Shoffner says as he watches the Glacier Girl being guided from the paint hangar where she has had a fresh coat of olive drab and cloud gray applied to her top and bottom skin, just like the day she rolled off Lockheed's assembly line in 1942.
The entire operation, from rescue to restoration, he says, cost him more than the plane is worth, which is estimated at $1.5 million.
"I don't care if I get my money back," he says. "This is not a viable financial project. I don't recommend it," he says with a laugh.
"But I didn't do this to make a profit. I wanted to do something that no one else had ever done before."
And he also intends to fly the plane, says the former F-89 Scorpion pilot, just as soon as he can get the insurance company over its jitters. Insurance for the first flight is $72,000.
After she proves air worthy, Shoffner says he intends to take the Glacier Girl on tour. "And I am going to fly this airplane. I'll just give the insurance company time to let their nerves settle down."
The Glacier Girl is about 80 percent original, says Shoffner. Before the long restoration project began, he rounded up all of the original Lockheed blueprints for the plane's many parts. Where a part was so damaged that it could not work, Shoffner and his team re-machined it.
Most of the metal outer skin, however, has had to be replaced, simply because of too much damage from more than 50 years in an icebox.
Shoffner, who walks with two canes at the moment from double-knee surgery, beamed as Glacier Girl rolled out into the afternoon Kentucky sun last week.
"This is aviation's last great adventure story," says Cardin, who had crawled into the cramped cockpit.
"No one has ever done this before, gone to a glacier and brought back Lightning. In 1942, she was only 62 days old with 74 hours of flight."
Shoffner, smiling like a new father, says he intends for the Glacier Girl to complete her mission to England before he is through with the story.
And on that day, an airplane that flew out of World War II will fly back into history. It will be like watching lightning strike twice.
Fred Brown can be reached at 342-6427 or brownf@knews.com
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