From:
Member Jim Parish
While at
Chino last trip (April, 2007), I met a great guy overhauling the
engine on Glacier Girl, The P38 they dug out of the ice a few years age ( I saw
it at Oshkosh in ' 04 when it made its debut.). I had dinner with him and learned a great deal about Allison and
RR Merlins. He owns an overhaul shop in
Rialto Ca..
They
are flying the P38 to the Duxford England air show in May ( I was
there last year, too bad not this year ) over the same glacier they dug it out
of a few years ago. (They don't want to
repeat the story) There was a compression problem with # 5 cyc. on the port
engine so they re-bored it and rebuilt that cylinder. While in Ca. I toured Jim's carrier, Midway. Took all day and did
it up right.
Exhuming the Glacier Girl
Written by Alan Bellows on January 22nd, 2007.
In the early days of the Second World War,
Allied forces began Operation Bolero, a daring and risky effort to bring
American planes to the European theater by way of secret airbases in the far
north. As part of this operation, on 15
July 1942 two Boeing B-17 bombers were being escorted by six Lockheed P-38
Lightning fighters as they flew over Greenland towards Reykjavik, Iceland.
Early in the morning, the flight group
encountered syrupy clouds, which forced
the pilots to climb over 12,000 feet to regain visibility. As the planes gained
altitude, temperatures inside fell to ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The men in the planes tried to improvise
ways to keep warm, such as rerouting the defroster into the cabin, but it did
little to help. At about 7:15am, after
encountering extreme numbness due to cold and continued poor visibility, the
pilots decided to return to the airport they had departed from. But the weather behind them had worsened,
and the men became disoriented in the severe conditions. After ninety minutes of flying blind with
only intermittent radio contact, the clouds cleared sufficiently for the flight
group to ascertain its position: they were over the east coast of Greenland,
about two hours from the nearest airport… and they had only twenty minutes of
fuel remaining. The men had no choice
but to crash-land on the icecap of Greenland.
Because their tanks were already running near empty, it was decided that the
smaller P-38 fighters should land first.
The B-17s would follow about thirty minutes later, once their fuel had
been further depleted. Pilot Brad
McManus decided to make the first attempt at landing. Uncertain whether the flat expanse of whiteness below was solid
ice or yielding snow, he descended with landing gears extended. He knew that if the ground was solid enough
to allow the plane to land this way, he could liftoff and fly back to base once
a fuel drop could be made. The other
pilots watched as McManus's plane touched down gently, rolling through the
thick snow at high speeds. Everything
appeared to be going smoothly for the first two hundred yards or so, but the
front landing gear buckled under the pressure, immediately flipping the P-38
onto its back.
Next was Robert Wilson, who had retracted
his landing gears after watching McManus's attempt go awry. His plane slid smoothly across the snow on
its belly, and once it stopped he leaped from the cockpit to dash almost a half
mile through knee-deep snow to the overturned plane. There, he found that McManus was unhurt, having cut himself out
of his parachute harness to dig his way out onto the ice. The other planes landed one by one without
further incident, and the twenty-five men gathered together to pool rations and
supplies. They quickly fabricated
makeshift heaters using engine parts and motor oil, and began the efforts to
contact Allied forces.
After three days in the freezing
temperatures, one of the radio operators finally received a Morse code message
from base, confirming the squadron's position and condition. Several supply drops were made, but the
first two loads disappeared on the horizon when their parachutes were ensnared
by the high winds on the flat expanse.
The stranded pilots acted quickly when further supplies arrived,
smothering the chutes before the much-needed supplies slipped away.
A dogsled team finally appeared on the
horizon on the tenth day. The airmen
collected their belongings from the mostly-intact planes, some of the men
riddling the electronics with bullets to foil any Nazi attempts to scavenge the
aircraft. Guided by the rescue team,
the group of Americans trudged through knee-deep snow for hours– through a maze
of zigzagging crevasses– before finally reaching the ocean's edge. The rescued airmen slept as they waited for
the Coast Guard cutter to arrive later that day. Once aboard, they were treated to showers, dry clothes, and a hot
meal. They had survived their
crash-landing and several days stranded on a desolate ice sheet, all without so
much as an injury.
The Allies were forced to abandon the
wounded planes, unable to retrieve them as they slowly disappeared under
drifting snow. The P-38 was a fast,
powerful aircraft, which was one of the most valuable Allied fighter planes of
the war, and the giant B-17 flying fortresses were massively useful in the war
in Europe. But as valuable as the aircraft
were, limited resources prevented a successful recovery. In time, the planes
became known as the Lost Squadron.
In the years following World War 2, the
P-38 and B-17 airframes soon became obsolete and were decommissioned, many of
them being melted down for scrap metal.
But the abandoned planes of the Lost Squadron were not forgotten, and
between 1977 and 1990, eleven different teams tried and failed to find and
recover the aircraft. It was generally
believed that they would be found in a state of near-perfect preservation, most
likely buried near the surface and relatively intact. But the particularly harsh environment made any search a
formidable task. Magnetometers and
small radar units found nothing in the search area.
In 1988, two explorers sponsored by the
Greenland Expedition Society finally found a lead. Patrick Epps and Richard
Taylor led an expedition to the ice cap which used steam to bore a hole and
locate airplane parts buried under the Greenland ice. The two men found that in the forty-six years since the planes
had crash-landed, an astonishing 268 feet of ice had accumulated over them, and
they had been carried three miles by the drifting glacier.
The Super Gopher
Given this extreme depth, the expedition's original
plan to dig or blast the planes out of the ice was no longer feasible. However the men did not resign the effort,
and in 1990 they returned with a contraption called the Super Gopher. This five-foot-tall, four-foot-diameter cylinder was suspended by
a chain and hoist, and it had a cone-shaped tip which was wrapped in copper
hot-water lines. The heat from these lines melted the ice at about two feet per
hour as a pump pushed the resulting water up to the surface. This thermal meltdown generator slowly
carved a long shaft deep into the ice, crawling deeper and deeper until it
finally struck something solid: the wing of a B-17.
A worker was lowered into the hole, where
he used a hot-water hose to melt a cavern around the plane's remains. Water was pumped to the surface as the ice
melted, and slowly the bomber was exposed.
It soon became apparent that the B-17 was very badly crushed, far beyond
worthwhile salvage. Devastated, Epps
and Taylor abandoned the effort and returned home.
After the initial sting of the failure
wore off, the men considered the situation further. It occurred to them that the smaller, more rugged P-38s would
probably be in much better condition than the B-17 had been. With renewed vigor, a follow-up expedition
was planned, with the intent to locate and extract one of the intact fighter
planes.
Two years later, the team was once again
burrowing a shaft into the Greenland ice.
It took the better part of a month for the gopher to chew its way to the
bounty, after which the machine was winched from the hole and set aside. It took the hose team about twenty-five
minutes to descend the long shaft, where they cut away the fifty-year-old ice
with pressurized steam. The slushy
runoff was pumped back to the surface as workers slogged through the ice water,
and the P-38 was slowly revealed as a cavity was created around it. As had been anticipated, the plane was in
much better condition than the B-17 had been.
The P-38 exposed in the ice cave
A team of technicians was lowered into the
ice cavern to begin the process of disassembling the aircraft so it could be
shuttled to the surface piece by piece.
The men found the ice cave to be uncomfortable and treacherous, with
very little room to move, constant dripping water, and occasional chunks of ice
falling from the ceiling. A few times,
a strike of a chisel would send fractures racing across the ceiling of the
cave, causing a number of tense moments for workers. But each piece was eventually detached from the plane,
catalogued, and sent up the shaft.
The last piece– the six thousand pound
center section– proved to be the most difficult, requiring that the shaft be
widened and a special manually-operated hoist be used. It took almost two full days for the final
section to creep its way to the top.
Almost exactly fifty years after his crash-landing, at the age of
seventy-four, pilot Brad McManus was there to stand amidst the disassembled
wreckage of the exhumed P-38. This
particular plane had been piloted by his friend, the late Harry Smith.
Once all of the parts were shipped to the
United States and collected together, the restoration project began. Soon it
became clear that the years spent under the ice had done more damage than had
been evident inside the ice cavern, but much of the hardware was
salvageable
. 
The Glacier Girl flies again
Those parts which were too damaged acted
as templates for the fabrication of replacement parts. The heap of wreckage, which was slowly
beginning to resemble an airplane again, was affectionately nicknamed "Glacier
Girl." Many individuals and organizations donated time and materials to
the historic project, and over nine years the airframe was transformed from a
wad of crushed remains into a beautiful, working airplane. She flew again on 26 October 2002, in front
of a crowd of over 20,000 people.
Today, of the 10,000 or so P-38s
Lightnings which were made in the 1940s, only about six working P-38s
remain.
Further reading:
Wikipedia on the P-38
Lightning