Glacier Girl and the P thirty-eight pulled from beneath two hundred sixty-eight feet of Greenland ice

In July 1942, eight U.S. military aircraft — six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses — made emergency gear-up landings on the Greenland ice cap after being trapped by whiteout conditions during a North Atlantic ferry mission. All 25 crew members survived, but the planes were left behind and eventually buried under 268 feet of glacial ice. Decades later, one of those Lightnings, known as Glacier Girl, was recovered and restored to airworthy condition in what became one of the most extraordinary warbird salvage operations in aviation history.

How Did Eight Warplanes End Up Buried in Greenland?

The aircraft were part of Operation Bolero, the Allied effort to ferry fighters and bombers across the North Atlantic to support the war in Europe. The route ran through Greenland and Iceland. On this mission, weather closed in from all directions, boxing the formation into whiteout conditions with no visibility and ceilings on the deck.

The flight leader ordered a turn back, but the weather had sealed off the return route as well. With the P-38s burning through their limited fuel reserves, every aircraft in the formation was forced to belly-land on the ice cap. Rescue teams reached the crews over the following days, but the military never returned for the planes.

Snow fell year after year, compressing into glacial ice. The eight aircraft sank steadily deeper. By the time anyone considered retrieval, they were buried under more than 250 feet of solid ice — not snow, but dense glacial ice that had swallowed them entirely.

Who Went Looking for the Lost Squadron?

Pat Epps, a businessman and aviator who ran Epps Aviation at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, partnered with Richard Taylor to find and recover the planes. Starting in the early 1980s, Epps organized multiple expeditions to Greenland, using magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar to search for the buried aircraft.

The ice cap complicated everything. It moves and flows, meaning the planes hadn’t simply sunk straight down — they had drifted with the glacier from their original landing positions. The team walked grid patterns across the ice in extreme conditions, with wind chills capable of freezing exposed skin in minutes. For years, they found nothing.

In 1988, they finally received solid radar returns. The results were sobering: the planes sat 268 feet below the surface, far deeper than anyone had hoped.

How Do You Extract a Fighter Plane From 268 Feet of Ice?

An open excavation pit was impossible — the ice walls would collapse inward. The recovery team engineered a device called the Super Gopher, a thermal boring tool that used a heated copper tube to melt a four-foot-diameter shaft straight down through the glacier. It functioned like an enormous heated cookie cutter, slowly melting its way to the buried aircraft.

The Super Gopher reached the first plane in 1992. The ice had crushed most of the airframes significantly. The B-17s were badly damaged. But P-38 number 222 was in recoverable condition — bent, compressed, and partially disassembled by ice pressure, but with its major structural components intact.

The disassembly and extraction happened 268 feet below the surface in a narrow shaft inside the glacier. Every component had to be hauled up through the shaft, transported across the ice to a staging area, and airlifted off Greenland by helicopter and cargo plane. The operation spanned multiple seasons and cost millions of dollars.

What Did the Restoration Involve?

A team in Middlesboro, Kentucky undertook the restoration, which consumed another ten years of work. Fifty years submerged in glacial ice had inflicted severe damage on every surface.

The aluminum skins were pitted and warped by corrosion. Much of the airframe had to be re-manufactured from scratch, using original Lockheed drawings where available and reverse engineering where they weren’t.

The twin Allison V-1710 engines — liquid-cooled V-12 powerplants each producing roughly 1,200 horsepower — had been sitting in ice for half a century. Parts were sourced globally from other P-38 wrecks, surplus stocks, and specialty machine shops. Every gear, bearing, and seal had to be rebuilt or replaced.

The P-38’s counter-rotating propellers, designed so one turned clockwise and the other counterclockwise to eliminate torque effects, presented their own challenge. Finding the correct handed propellers and rebuilding them to airworthy standards became a project within the project.

The cockpit was rebuilt to original specifications — instruments, yoke, and throttle quadrant all painstakingly restored or reproduced. The twin booms were straightened and re-skinned. The center nacelle was rebuilt practically from the ground up. The finished aircraft wore olive drab and neutral gray wartime colors, with the nose art reading Glacier Girl.

When Did Glacier Girl Fly Again?

On October 26, 2002, Glacier Girl flew for the first time in sixty years, with Rod Lewis at the controls. The twin Allisons settled into the distinctive synchronized rumble that wartime P-38 pilots would have recognized instantly.

Some of the people present at that first flight had been involved in the recovery and restoration effort for nearly 20 years. Glacier Girl went on to become one of the most recognized warbirds in the world, flying the airshow circuit and appearing at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh.

Why Does Glacier Girl Matter?

Lockheed built approximately 10,000 P-38 Lightnings during World War II. Fewer than 30 remain airworthy today. Every restoration that returns one of these aircraft to flying condition is a victory against time.

The P-38 was among the most versatile airframes of the war. Richard Bong, America’s ace of aces with 40 confirmed kills in the Pacific, flew a Lightning. Thomas McGuire, the second-highest-scoring American ace, flew one as well. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean in a P-38 on a reconnaissance mission. The Lightning served in roles spanning photo reconnaissance, ground attack, long-range escort, and night fighting.

Glacier Girl, serial number 222, never saw combat. She went into the ice on a ferry flight before firing her guns in anger. But her battle was against ice, time, and the widespread belief that recovery was impossible.

Pat Epps passed away in 2023, having lived to see his vision realized and celebrated worldwide. The airplane he pulled from beneath a glacier flew the airshow circuit for more than two decades.

Key Takeaways

• Eight U.S. aircraft made emergency landings on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942 during Operation Bolero; all 25 crew members survived, but the planes were abandoned and buried by glacial ice over the following decades.
• Pat Epps and Richard Taylor led a multi-decade search-and-recovery effort beginning in the 1980s, finally locating the aircraft at 268 feet below the surface in 1988.
• The Super Gopher thermal boring device created a four-foot shaft through the glacier, enabling the piece-by-piece extraction of P-38 number 222 in 1992.
• A ten-year restoration in Middlesboro, Kentucky rebuilt the aircraft using original drawings, reverse engineering, and parts sourced from P-38 wrecks worldwide.
• Glacier Girl flew again on October 26, 2002, becoming one of fewer than 30 airworthy P-38 Lightnings in existence and one of the most celebrated warbirds in the world.