June 22, 2007, 7:08 am
Plane Freed From a Glacier Sets Out for Britain Again
By Patrick J. Lyons
A week ago, the eyes of an anxious world were fixed on Tulsa, Okla., straining for a glimpse of a time-capsule car being unearthed after 50 years under the courthouse lawn — which, despite all the precautions that circa-1957 civic hucksterism thought to take in prepping the car, dashed many a fond hope when it emerged from its vault as only a Plymouth Belvedere-shaped lump of rust. Sniff.
Chin up, though. The Lede's got another 50-year Lazarus story to watch today - a vehicle buried even deeper, with no hoopla, no cosmoline and no thought of retrieval at the time. Even so, this one promises a much happier ending.
Around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time today, a World War II-era P-38 Lightning fighter plane is set to take off from Teterboro Airport in northeastern New Jersey, bound for Duxford, England — where it is almost 65 years overdue.
UPDATE: The plane took off on schedule and by early evening had completed the first leg of the trip without trouble; more below.
The plane was one of six P-38s and two B-17 bombers on their way to help shore up the defenses of the British Isles in July 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor, when bad weather blocked them first from reaching a refueling base in Iceland and then from making it back to their previous stop in western Greenland. The pilots wound up having to make emergency landings on Greenland's ice cap, where they were spotted by air and rescued by dogsled teams three days later.
Greenland's harsh climate soon buried the planes in snow and ice – almost 270 feet of it, eventually — so though the rough whereabouts of what came to be called the Lost Squadron were known, the planes were not precisely located until 1983. Nine years later - when they had been icebound for 50 years - an expedition succeeded in burrowing down to one of the P-38s.
Salvagers melted the ice away from the buried P-38 and disassembled it to bring it to the surface in 1992. Remarkably, though the weight of all that ice had squeezed and crushed some parts, for the most part the arctic deep-freeze had preserved the plane in remarkably good condition. Named Glacier Girl by the salvagers, the plane was carefully disassembled to get it to the surface, shipped home and painstakingly restored to flying shape over the next nine years; since 2002 it has been a regular visitor at air shows and aviation museums.
Still, Glacier Girl had some unfinished business, which it will try to attend to today: finishing that journey to Britain.
The plane said goodbye to its home base in Middlesboro, Ky., on Thursday, and circled the Statue of Liberty before setting down at Teterboro to prepare for the trans-Atlantic hop. If all goes as planned today, it will be escorted on its first 100 miles by another vintage fighter, a P-51 Mustang - and riding shotgun in that one will be a man described by the organizers as the last survivor of the original Lost Squadron crew: Brad McManus, the pilot of another of the P-38s, who is now 89.
UPDATE: Glacier Girl took off on schedule along with its companion P-51, Miss Velma, and flew northeastward across New England on the first leg of the transatlantic journey, making a planned refueling stop in Presque Isle, Me. late in the afternoon to complete the first leg of an eight-hop flight plan from Teterboro to Duxford.
An aviation web site, AirShowBuzz, is tracking the flight in real time, and relaying e-mail messages and questions to the pilots of the Glacier Girl while in flight - a far cry from the primitive radar and crackly radios that were all Mr. McManus and his felow pilots had to work with in 1942.