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The WWII plane was lost, encased 300 feet deep in ice. A drone found it

By Joe Marusak
The restoration of Glacier Girl a P38 Lighting nears completion. On Friday, Feb. 8, 2001 the plane waits for completion . The jacket in the case in middle of the picture is a US Air Corps 1942 issued cold weather flight jacket that was found durning the pulling the plane from the ice. In May of 1992, a P-38 Lighting fighter plane, the Glacier Girl was pull from the Ice in Greenland where it had crashed on July 15, 1942 durning World War II. J. Roy Shoffner, Middlesboro, Ky. funded and helped in the expredition to remove plane and to retore and fly it. The project at first was $1.2 million and was to take about 18 months to complet restoration on the plane that was one of The Lost Squardron, Glacier Girl 17630 . Now 10 years later and $3 million plus, the plane is about 3 months away from completion. The plane is being restored at the Lost Squadron Museum that is located at the Middlesboro, Ky.,/Bell county airport. It is open 7 days a week and admission is free.
The restoration of Glacier Girl a P38 Lighting nears completion. On Friday, Feb. 8, 2001 the plane waits for completion . The jacket in the case in middle of the picture is a US Air Corps 1942 issued cold weather flight jacket that was found durning the pulling the plane from the ice. In May of 1992, a P-38 Lighting fighter plane, the Glacier Girl was pull from the Ice in Greenland where it had crashed on July 15, 1942 durning World War II. J. Roy Shoffner, Middlesboro, Ky. funded and helped in the expredition to remove plane and to retore and fly it. The project at first was $1.2 million and was to take about 18 months to complet restoration on the plane that was one of The Lost Squardron, Glacier Girl 17630 . Now 10 years later and $3 million plus, the plane is about 3 months away from completion. The plane is being restored at the Lost Squadron Museum that is located at the Middlesboro, Ky.,/Bell county airport. It is open 7 days a week and admission is free. FRANK ANDERSON LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

A drone with ground-penetrating radar found a World War II plane that was encased 300 feet deep in ice on Greenland.

The P-38 Lightning fighter plane was part of a “lost squadron” of planes that crashed-landed on Greenland during a blizzard on July 15, 1942, Popular Mechanics reported. All crew members on the six P-38s and two B-17s were rescued after nine days, and the planes were left behind, according to the magazine.

The drone found the plane on July 4 in a part of a glacier where “hints of the buried warplane were detected in 2011,” Live Science reported.

The search in a remote region with “hungry polar bears” was led by Jim Salazar and Ken McBride of the non-profit Arctic Hotpoint Solutions and the Fallen American MIA Repatriation Foundation, according to Live Science.

The team used a “heat probe driven by a hot pressure washer system to tunnel through the ice” and try to confirm what the drone detected was a plane, according to Popular Mechanics. The probe was covered in hydraulic fluid when it surfaced, the magazine reported.

Another one of the “lost” P-38s was found and removed from the glacier in 1992, American Military News reported. “Glacier Girl” was “fully restored and flew again,” according to the news site.

The search team intends “to dig and melt” the recently found P-38 from the glacier in summer 2019, Live Science reported.

Joe Marusak: 704-358-5067; @jmarusak

This story was originally published August 27, 2018 at 9:55 PM.

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