Glacier Girl and the P-38 Lightning pulled from under the ice

Glacier Girl is a Lockheed P-38F Lightning that belly-landed on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942, spent 50 years buried under 268 feet of glacial ice, and was recovered, rebuilt from wreckage, and flown again on October 26, 2002. The recovery and restoration took more than two decades, cost an estimated $3 million, and stands as one of the most ambitious aircraft restorations in aviation history.

How Did a P-38 Lightning End Up Under a Glacier?

In July 1942, seven months after the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Forces was ferrying fighters and bombers across the Atlantic to England via the North Atlantic route — island-hopping through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and on to Scotland.

On July 15, a flight of six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses encountered a whiteout over Greenland. Zero visibility, howling winds, ice accumulating on the wings. The pilots couldn’t reach their destination at Bluie West Eight airfield. All eight aircraft made belly landings on the ice cap.

Every crew member survived. Twenty-five men were rescued over the following days by dog sled teams and a Coast Guard vessel. The airplanes stayed where they were. Year after year, snowfall packed into glacial ice, and the aircraft sank deeper into the frozen surface.

Why Was the P-38 Worth Recovering?

The P-38 Lightning was Lockheed’s masterpiece — a twin-boom, twin-engine fighter with counter-rotating propellers, turbo superchargers, and a center nacelle cockpit. By the 1980s, very few P-38s remained in flying condition anywhere in the world. The idea of six of them frozen in time beneath Greenland’s ice was irresistible to warbird enthusiasts.

The Expeditions to Find and Recover the Lost Squadron

In 1981, Pat Epps, an Atlanta airport operator, and Richard Taylor, a businessman, set out to retrieve the planes. They expected maybe 10 to 15 feet of snow cover. They’d brush them off and fly them home.

They were wildly wrong. Using magnetometers and ice-penetrating radar, they discovered the aircraft were under more than 260 feet of solid glacial ice. Forty years of accumulation had swallowed them completely.

Rather than walk away, Epps and Taylor formed the Greenland Expedition Society and kept returning. Throughout the 1980s, they experimented with thermal meltdown devices — giant copper heating coils lowered into the ice. They called the contraption the “Super Gopher,” a thermal probe that melted a vertical shaft straight down through the glacier.

By 1992, after more than a decade of expeditions, the team reached one of the P-38s. The aircraft was sitting in a cavern of meltwater, crushed and twisted by half a century of glacial pressure. The fuselage was compressed, the booms bent, the wings mangled.

They selected the best-preserved airframe — a P-38F, serial number 41-7630 — and cut it into pieces small enough to fit back up through the bore hole. Each section was brought to the surface across multiple expeditions, a process described by participants as performing surgery with a crane in a blizzard.

Rebuilding Glacier Girl From Wreckage

The pieces were shipped to Middlesboro, Kentucky, where a restoration team led by Bob Cardin began the rebuild. What they had wasn’t an airplane — it was a pile of bent, corroded, frozen aluminum.

Every component had to be assessed, straightened, repaired, or fabricated from scratch. The Allison V-1710 engines were seized solid, packed with glacial silt and corrosion. Instruments were destroyed. Control cables, hydraulic systems — all gone.

Cardin’s team tracked down original Lockheed engineering drawings and Allison engine manuals. They sourced parts from other P-38 wrecks and from manufacturers that still had wartime tooling. New skin panels were hand-formed to match originals. Every rivet, bracket, and hinge had to be correct.

The P-38 was no simple aircraft. Twin engines, tricycle gear, counter-rotating propellers, turbo superchargers, and a sophisticated hydraulic system made this restoration exponentially more complex than a typical warbird project.

Glacier Girl Flies Again

On October 26, 2002, more than 60 years after her belly landing on the ice cap, Glacier Girl took to the air. Test pilot Steve Hinton, one of the most respected warbird pilots in the world, made the first flight from Middlesboro.

The aircraft is painted in her original olive drab and neutral gray scheme, carrying the markings of the 94th Fighter Squadron. She has appeared at airshows across the country and has been based at the Epps Aviation facility.

What Happened to the Other Lost Squadron Aircraft?

The remaining five P-38s and two B-17s are still buried under the Greenland ice cap. The glacier has shifted them approximately two miles from their original landing site. Continued glacial pressure has crushed them further, making recovery even more difficult now than it was in the 1990s. Despite the challenges, plans and discussions about returning for the remaining aircraft have never fully stopped.

The Legacy of Glacier Girl

Pat Epps passed away in 2023, having spent the last four decades of his life pursuing the recovery of the Lost Squadron. The project was never about profit — it was about the conviction that the history these machines carried was worth preserving.

Only a handful of P-38 Lightnings remain airworthy worldwide. Each is irreplaceable. Glacier Girl is the only one that came back from beneath a glacier.

The primary published account of the recovery is “Lost Squadron” by David Hayes. The Lost Squadron Museum maintains archives from the project.

Key Takeaways

Eight U.S. military aircraft (six P-38s, two B-17s) belly-landed on the Greenland ice cap on July 15, 1942; all 25 crew members survived
The aircraft sank under 268 feet of glacial ice over 40 years — far deeper than early recovery teams expected
Recovery required a custom thermal boring device and over a decade of expeditions before the team reached the aircraft in 1992
Glacier Girl flew again on October 26, 2002, after a full ground-up restoration in Middlesboro, Kentucky, at an estimated cost exceeding $3 million
The remaining seven aircraft are still buried under the ice and have shifted roughly two miles from their original position