Glacier Girl - The Lost Squadron (Recovery of a P-38 from beneath a Greenland ice cap)

Glacier Girl - The Lost Squadron (Recovery of a P-38 from beneath a Greenland ice cap)

Glacier Girl Recovery

The Expedition Begins

On July 15, 1992, fifty years to the day later, 74-year-old Brad McManus stood on the ice cap surrounded by the recovered pieces of his late friend Harry Smith's P‑38, and was flooded with memories of his wartime experience and the lifetime friendships that he held dear to his heart.
A new mission was about to begin...
The Greenland Expedition, for which Bob Cardin was the Project Manager and the one that was successful in recovering one of the planes (the P‑38 which would come to be known as "Glacier Girl"), was actually the 13th expedition to go looking for the Lost Squadron, beginning in 1983.
A combination of historic photos, understanding of ice movement and subsurface sensing systems such as GPR and magnetometry led to success. Over the course of a decade and after several expeditions, technological advances helped pin-point the Lost Squadron's location.
During that period, more advanced GPR systems appeared, and when combined with the advent of GPS, enabled reliable and repeatable subsurface imaging. (Thanks to sensoft.ca for this info. More technical details here.)
This is a portion of the picture the expedition members used to determine which of the P‑38s they would try to recover.  You can see from the photo that the props are intact.  When Smith landed her, he feathered the props which (50 years later) enabled the crew to recover the engines and all of the propeller blades except one.  Good job, Harry!

Getting to the Plane

Next on the checklist? Getting the plane to the surface. How do you get a P­38 out of the ice? Simple...melt the ice!
Well, maybe not as simple as that, seeing how it was 268 feet of ice. Basically, you start with a six-digit budget, followed by transporting tons of equipment that include arctic survival gear and heavy construction machinery, and top it all off with adventure-minded individuals willing to take the hardships and risks associated with one-of-a-kind expeditions to a hostile environment. That's what it took to recover a P‑38 from "The Lost Squadron."
The contraption designed to burrow through the ice looks like a technologically advanced spinning top. It's called the Super Gopher -- a thermal meltdown generator -- and melts the ice by circulating hot water from a collector and pumping it through copper tubing coiled around the outside. The four-foot-wide device is suspended over the area to be tunneled through by a hoist and chain, being lowered at a rate of about two feet per hour. The water created is pumped out through a hose coupled to a submersible pump.
When the Gopher completed melting its 268-foot-deep shaft it was winched out of the hole and set aside. The hole took the better part of a month to complete. The descent to the bottom of the ice hole took twenty-five minutes. Men equipped with steam hoses were lowered in to carve out a cave surrounding the aircraft. Water created from this was constantly pumped out, as workers had to slog through ice water to keep the project moving along.
Salvaging the P‑38 from the glacier took long hours of hard work, all of which had to be performed in cramped surroundings in a rain of melting water and chunks of ice that periodically fell from the cavern roof. There were several tense moments when the striking of a chisel sent cracks like bolts of lightning running through the roof of the ice cavern.
Once the cavern was completed, the task of disassembling the plane lay ahead...

Bringing Glacier Girl to the Surface

Technicians began to take the P‑38 apart piece by piece. Propellers had to be removed, the wings had to be disconnected, the fuselage disassembled; every part of the plane was scrutinized, logged and recorded and then hoisted to the surface.
The last section of the aircraft, the center section, was seventeen feet by twenty-one feet and weighed seven-thousand pounds. It, too, had to travel the 268 feet to the surface. Attached to the plane were cables that ran up to several winches. The bulk of the lifting was done by one very powerful manually operated hoist. Using it required applying great pressure uniformly, and it turned out that only one member of the team had the necessary strength for the job. The crank required four turns for every quarter-inch rise.
We just want you to get a picture of how challenging this project was. Manually-operated hoist, 7,000 pounds, one guy, four cranks to raise it 1/4 inch, 268 feet. Yeah. Think about it.
Several people on the surface were needed to monitor the various other winches, and someone had to ride on the plane section to make sure it came up evenly and avoid any obstacles in the shaft. The raising of this section took almost two full days.
After reaching the surface, the crew had to be extremely careful removing the section from the hoist, as a mishap at this point would send the huge section plunging down the shaft. Due to the limited height of the hoisting frame, the crew had to dig away a ramp on one side of the shaft onto which the plane could be pulled and released. Once done and out of the hole, a bottle of champagne was opened and signed by the remaining team members and dropped down the shaft. The recovery took four months to complete.

Bringing Glacier Girl Home

Arrangements were made to take their cargo back to the states. A Sikorsky S‑51, a heavy-duty cargo copter, was employed to carry the center section to a sea port where two weeks later the section was loaded onto a Danish ship that carried it to Denmark, and eventually to the docks at Savannah, Georgia. From there it was delivered to project funder Roy Shoffner's hangar in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where the restoration began.

Before the Rebuild...

Restoration of Glacier Girl began in January of 1993, after all shipments of aircraft parts from the dig were finally gathered together.
The restoration was being done in Roy Shoffner's (project financier) hangar in Middlesboro, Kentucky. Under the supervision of Bob Cardin (project coordinator for the 1992 expedition) warbird specialists began their task by disassembling the massive center section.
After initial deconstruction of the plane began, it was evident that damage was more extensive than what appeared on the surface. The more they took apart, the more damage they found.
The plane had to be taken apart down to the smallest manageable pieces, making sure each piece was marked for later identification. Parts were then cleaned and checked for functionality to determine if it could be used again, repaired for use, or replaced entirely. Damaged parts served as templates for construction of replacements.
Aiding in the process of restoration, an extensive research library was compiled. For research and copy fees of $1,200, the Smithsonian Institution supplied eight reels of microfilm and stacks of photocopies of era aviation maintenance handbooks, parts and repair manuals. Cardin's team, using the acquired documents, managed to more or less duplicate the original construction process carried out in the 1940s.

Rebuilding Glacier Girl

Spring of 1993 saw the beginning of actually rebuilding the plane, the main spar being the starting point. Clicos -- temporary fasteners resembling bullets -- were used so parts could be attached and removed to ensure proper fit and to be certain no pieces were overlooked.
Parts were much cheaper to acquire than creating molds to fabricate new ones. Finding them proved to be another adventure in itself. Cardin said he and Shoffner had visited people who claimed to have P-38s, only to discover unrecognizable piles of aluminum that wouldn't pass as airplane parts. They felt like they spent more hours playing detective than actually acquiring parts. Even when parts were located, owners were reluctant to part with them.
In one case, Cardin found a needed set of engine cowling replacements, only to be told he would trade them for a Wright 1820, a rare model of aircraft engine. Cardin found one, traded for that engine and then traded for the cowlings. Another part needed was a control yoke. After several months search Cardin found one, but the owner was unwilling to part with it. Cardin's persistence, along with a little luck, finally led him to a warehouse where he found two hundred of them. The owner of the warehouse didn't realize what they were!
Interested parties also donated their expertise in goods and services to the project. Companies such as B.F. Goodrich Aerospace in England rebuilt the landing gear and brakes, and a Pennsylvania company fabricated a new canopy. An aviation mechanic volunteered to rebuild the Allison engines for the cost of parts. The electrical system was replaced in the same manner.

When this project was completed, Glacier Girl was one of the most perfect warbird restorations ever. "This is going to be the finest P-38 in the world, and it may be the finest restoration of any warbird ever done," said Cardin.
Work completed, thousands of people, from veteran aviators and aviation buffs to curious onlookers, come to a hangar in Middlesboro, Kentucky, to see a not-so-forgotten piece of history.

Maiden Flight

Around the time of the expedition and all during the restoration, there was tremendous media interest in this story.  We've included a couple of articles as well as this video of her first public flight.

FROZEN IN GLACIER, WWII P‑38 IS ROARING TO LIFE

By ROGER ALFORD

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, September 17, 2001

MIDDLESBORO, Ky. -- Glacier Girl has roared back to life, nearly 60 years after being abandoned on a glacier in Greenland and entombed under hundreds of feet of snow and ice.
The P‑38 Lightning, one of the fastest planes in the sky during World War II, was among six fighters and two bombers forced to crash-land during foul weather in Greenland on July 15, 1942.
The crews were rescued, but the planes were left behind and nearly forgotten.
As a boy in Middlesboro, Roy Shoffner had become enamored with the piston-engine, propeller-driven P‑38s and imagined flying one of the planes, which could reach 405 mph at altitudes of up to 35,000 feet.
In the summer of 1992, he recovered one of the P‑38s abandoned in Greenland, and a week ago he reached a milestone: the 1,275-horsepower engines were fired up at the Middlesboro Airport, turning propellers for the first time since 1942.
Even before that, the plane named Glacier Girl for its years in the ice had become a hit in Middlesboro, drawing about 3,500 people a month to the Lost Squadron Museum to watch the restoration.
"People cannot believe we went down into the ice cap, disassembled the airplane, brought it up one piece at a time, and now have put it back together," Shoffner said. "It's bringing in thousands of visitors," said Judy Barton, director of the Bell County Tourism Commission.
"If it ever flies, I don't believe we'll ever be able to handle the crowds of people who will come to see."
Although the United States built 10,113 of the planes, just 24 survive, and only six still are flying. The pilots of the lost planes had to land on the glacier because they were low on fuel and caught in thick clouds. It took rescuers on dog sleds 10 days to reach the 25 crew members; they got everyone back safely.
By the time Shoffner -- a 73-year-old restaurateur, former banker and 1950s Air Force fighter pilot -- got to the plane, the decades of snowstorms had buried it 268 feet deep. "If you can't go through it, and you can't go around it, you just work up another solution to the problem," he said.
Crews used streams of hot water to melt a 48-inch-wide tunnel down to the plane and open a cavern around it. (Editor's note: This story has been corrected since original publication to fix the width of the tunnel.)
Disassembling and retrieving the plane took about four months and cost about $638,000, said Bob Cardin, director of the restoration effort. Tooling parts to replace those destroyed by the weight of the ice has pushed the cost to the $3 million range, Shoffner said.
They hope to taxi the plane at an air show at the airport Oct. 6-7, and get Glacier Girl flying again sometime next year.
Shoffner wants to fly it to Europe. "The insurance company would like to have someone who has experience flying a P‑38 to be the pilot," Shoffner said. "But it's my airplane, and I'm going to fly it."

GLACIER GIRL TAKES FLIGHT!

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 26, 2002

MIDDLESBORO, Ky. -- With propellers whirling and 1,275-horsepower twin engines humming, pilot Steve Hinton raced the P‑38 Lightning down the runway and lifted it into a gray sky for a 30-minute flight before an estimated 20,000 spectators in this small eastern Kentucky town.

Glacier Girl Photos

The P-38 National Association would like to thank Michael H. Horrell (from Hyperscale) for his kind donation of the following photos of Glacier Girl's first flight for our use. I think you'll agree they are beautiful shots, and we very much appreciate his contribution to the site. We would also like to thank Brett Green, who originally published the photos.

In the hangar	Tow Out	Flight Check
Tricycle Gear	Nose Art	Nacelle
Glacier Girl Pilot & Certified Mechanic, Steve Hinton	Final Check	Steve Hinton, ready for takeoff
Engine Run-Up	Final Run-Up	Ready to remove the blocks
Taxi to Runway	Ready for takeoff	After 50+ years, she takes to the air again!
Off She Goes...	Into the Wild Blue Yonder!	Hinton thrills the crowd with multiple flybys!

Photo donated by Pat Carry with these details:  "This is the front piece of the P-38 now known as Glacier Girl. This photo was taken by Pat on August 19 at Oshkosh,WI.  It was brought there less than 2 weeks after being brought up from the ice."

More great Glacier Girl photos, sent to us by Doug Goerke.  I believe he took them while she was still in Middlesboro at the Lost Squadron Museum (which was closed when Glacier Girl was sold to Rod Lewis).