Glacier Girl and the Lost Squadron - The P Thirty-Eight Pulled From Two Hundred Sixty-Eight Feet of Greenland Ice

Glacier Girl is a P-38 Lightning fighter that crash-landed on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942, was buried under 268 feet of glacial ice for half a century, and was recovered and restored to flying condition. In October 2002, sixty years after it slid to a stop on the ice, the aircraft started its engines and flew again. It remains one of the most remarkable warbird recovery stories in aviation history.

The 1942 Snowball Route and the Flight That Went Down

During World War II, the United States needed to move fighters and bombers across the Atlantic to England. Single-engine fighters couldn’t cross the ocean directly, so planners built a chain of short northern legs: Maine to Labrador, across to Greenland, on to Iceland, and finally into Scotland. It was called the Snowball Route - short hops, brutal cold, and weather that could change in minutes.

On July 8, 1942, a flight left Greenland bound for Iceland: six brand-new P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses. The Lightnings were fresh off the production line - the twin-boom fighter the Germans would later nickname the “fork-tailed devil.” Most of the young pilots had never flown in weather like what waited ahead.

Why the Lost Squadron Landed on the Ice

The flight hit a wall of weather: solid overcast, icing, and a headwind that burned fuel far faster than planned. Iceland was fogged in and unreachable. The aircraft turned back for Greenland, but the clouds there ran right down to the ice.

Eight aircraft, falling fuel gauges, and nothing below but a frozen sheet of white. The flight leader made the call to put every aircraft down on the ice cap on their bellies.

The first B-17 touched down gear-down by mistake and nearly nosed over, so the rest bellied in wheels-up, sliding across the glacier on their aluminum skins. All 25 airmen walked away. Not one was lost. The crews spent more than a week on the ice while rescuers reached them on foot, by dog sled, and by air-drop, and every man was pulled off the glacier alive. The aircraft, however, stayed exactly where they came to rest.

How the Aircraft Disappeared Under the Glacier

Season after season, snow fell and compressed into ice. A glacier is a moving thing - it flows, and it swallows. Within a few decades the field of aircraft had sunk deep into the cap and drifted sideways with the ice itself, vanishing from sight entirely. They became known as the Lost Squadron.

Finding the Lost Squadron: The 268-Foot Problem

Beginning in the 1980s, expeditions returned to Greenland to locate the aircraft. It proved far harder than anyone expected.

Two problems stood out. First, the ice had moved - the glacier had carried the aircraft more than a mile from the original landing site. Second, and far more daunting, was the depth. When radar finally located the aircraft beneath the ice, the readings were almost impossible to believe: the aircraft were 268 feet down - deeper than a football field is long, roughly the height of a 25-story building, buried in hard, old, compressed blue ice.

How Glacier Girl Was Recovered in 1992

Most attempts ended in failure. But in 1992, one persistent team finally reached the aircraft using hot water. They built a device that melted a shaft straight down through the ice - a column just wide enough for a person - running scalding water through a nozzle and pumping the meltwater back out, boring downward foot by foot.

At the bottom of that shaft, 268 feet below the surface, they found a P-38 Lightning.

The glacier had crushed most of the others. The two B-17s were destroyed, folded flat under the weight of the ice, and several Lightnings were flattened. But one Lightning had survived largely intact - bent and wounded, but whole. The team melted out a cavern around it, disassembled it in the ice cave - engines, booms, wings, and center section - and hauled each piece up through the shaft.

The preservation was extraordinary. There was still oil in the lines and rubber in the tires. Sealed in a deep freeze since 1942, the aircraft was in some ways better preserved than warbirds that had sat in dry hangars for the same 50 years.

The Restoration and First Flight in 2002

The recovered aircraft was brought home to Kentucky. Rather than displaying it behind glass, a dedicated team spent years straightening what the glacier had bent, remanufacturing what couldn’t be saved, and returning the fighter to airworthy condition. They named her Glacier Girl.

In October 2002 - sixty years after she went down - Glacier Girl started her two Allison engines, taxied out, and flew. She has since appeared at airshows, her twin-boom shadow and distinctive Lightning growl crossing the crowd. The aircraft is a living tribute: to the 25 men who walked away, to the people who spent fortunes clawing her out of the ice, and to every volunteer who helped rebuild her.

What Happened to the Rest of the Lost Squadron

The remaining aircraft are still there. Five P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses remain buried in the Greenland ice cap, drifting with the glacier and sitting even deeper now than when Glacier Girl was recovered. There is periodic talk of mounting another recovery, but as of now, Glacier Girl is the only aircraft of the Lost Squadron to be brought back to the surface - and the only one to fly again.

Key Takeaways

Glacier Girl is a P-38 Lightning that force-landed on the Greenland ice cap on July 8, 1942, as part of a flight of six P-38s and two B-17s on the wartime Snowball Route.
All 25 airmen survived the emergency landing and were rescued within a couple of weeks.
The aircraft were buried and drifted to 268 feet deep, more than a mile from where they landed, earning the nickname the Lost Squadron.
The Lightning was recovered in 1992 by melting a shaft through the ice with hot water, then restored in Kentucky and flown again in October 2002.
Five P-38s and two B-17s remain entombed in the glacier today.