Glacier Girl, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning Buried Under Two Hundred and Sixty-Eight Feet of Greenland Ice, and the Ten-Year Restoration That Brought Her Home

Glacier Girl is a Lockheed P-38F Lightning - serial number 41-7630 - that made an emergency landing on the Greenland ice sheet on July 15, 1942, sank under 268 feet of glacial ice over the following five decades, and was recovered and restored to airworthy condition, making her first post-restoration flight on October 26, 2002. She is one of only a handful of P-38 Lightnings still flying in the world, and the only one that came out of a glacier.

How Eight American Aircraft Ended Up Under Greenland Ice

In the summer of 1942, the U.S. Army Air Forces needed to get aircraft to England quickly. German submarines were sinking Atlantic shipping faster than aircraft could be loaded, making the North Atlantic ferry route the only viable alternative. The route ran from Presque Isle, Maine, to Labrador, across to Greenland, north to Iceland, and east to Scotland - each leg a navigation challenge in aircraft designed for combat, not overwater endurance flights.

The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was one of the few fighters with enough range to attempt the crossing. Fitted with ferry tanks and a careful fuel plan, it was possible - but the margins were thin, and the pilots were young, some still learning the aircraft.

Operation Bolero was the name given to the ferrying effort. On July 15, 1942, two Boeing B-17E Flying Fortresses were shepherding six P-38F Lightnings across the Denmark Strait when weather deteriorated rapidly. Cloud built from above and below, icing conditions developed, and visibility dropped. The flight lead diverted the formation back toward Greenland, looking for Bluie West Eight, an emergency airfield on the southern ice sheet.

Fuel state went from low to critical. The order came: put them on the ice.

All six P-38s and both B-17s made emergency landings on the Greenland ice sheet - no runway, no tower, no ground crew. All twelve crew members walked away without injury. Army rescue parties evacuated the men within days. The aircraft were written off as weather losses, logged in the official records, and left behind.

What the Greenland Ice Sheet Does to Whatever It Covers

The Greenland ice sheet is not static. It is one of the largest masses of moving ice on Earth, flowing slowly but continuously toward the sea. Snow falling on its surface does not simply pile up - it compresses under its own weight, converting from snow to firn to dense glacial ice. Anything sitting on the surface when this process begins does not stay on the surface.

By the late 1950s, the eight aircraft were buried under dozens of feet of ice. By the 1960s, more. By the 1980s, the depth exceeded 100 feet and was still increasing. The glacier was also moving the aircraft southward, away from the original landing coordinates recorded in Army records. For decades, the story of the Lost Squadron circulated among aviation history enthusiasts as a closed chapter.

How Pat Epps Spent Almost a Decade Looking for the Lost Squadron

Pat Epps was an Atlanta businessman and pilot who heard about the Lost Squadron in the early 1980s. The idea that six P-38 Lightnings were sitting intact under Greenland ice - sealed in cold that might have preserved them - was not something he could leave alone. He recruited his friend Richard Taylor, another Atlanta pilot, and the two began organizing expeditions.

Starting around 1983, Epps and Taylor were making self-funded trips to the Greenland ice cap with ground-penetrating radar and survey equipment. The challenge was substantial: the aircraft had moved with the glacier, the ice had absorbed them, and running radar surveys across a featureless expanse in conditions that can go from clear to whiteout in minutes is not a quick process.

The expeditions through the mid-1980s produced promising radar returns but not confirmed targets. The aircraft were deeper than expected and farther south than the records indicated. By 1988, the team had clear, convincing radar returns. The aircraft were there. What they needed now was a way to reach them.

Drilling 268 Feet Down: The Recovery Operation

The team’s thermal melting device was called the Super Gopher - a hot water drill that melted a borehole straight down through glacial ice by circulating hot water through the drill head, pumping the melt water back up, reheating it, and sending it back down. The shaft stayed open as long as the system was running.

With significant backing from Kentucky businessman Roy Shoffner, the team returned to Greenland in 1992 with a fully equipped operation and began drilling.

The drill reached 268 feet before it found the aircraft.

That depth is comparable to stacking five Boeing 737s nose to tail. Workers descended into that shaft in temperatures cold enough to make lungs ache and fingers useless within minutes. At the bottom, the twin-boom silhouette of the P-38 was still visible through the ice - that distinctive shape that makes the Lightning unmistakable from any angle.

Nothing was coming out intact. Decades of compression had buckled the structure, displaced the booms, and crushed sections of the airframe. The crew cut the aircraft apart in sections and hauled each piece up through the shaft by hand - 268 feet to the surface, one piece at a time, over days of cold and deliberate work.

The serial number confirmed the aircraft’s identity: 41-7630, a P-38F, one of the six that had set down on this same ice fifty years earlier.

What the Glacier Preserved - and What It Destroyed

The crated pieces were shipped to Fighter Rebuilders at Chino Airport in California, operated by Steve Hinton. What the shop found when it spread the parts out presented a complicated picture.

The cold had preserved the aircraft in ways a junkyard or even a dry barn could not have. The compressed ice had sealed the aluminum away from oxygen and from the moisture that causes the worst corrosion. Some instruments were intact. Cockpit upholstery was still present. Control cables survived. Patches of original paint were visible through fifty years of grime.

The structure was another matter. The twin booms were knocked out of alignment. The cockpit section was compressed. Both Allison V-1710 engines were crushed beyond any possibility of rebuild. Structural members throughout showed the stress of decades under a moving glacier.

The Decade-Long Restoration That Brought Her Back

Lockheed P-38 parts are not catalog items. The aircraft went out of production in 1945. The supply of original parts consists of whatever has been salvaged from crashed airframes over eight decades, plus whatever can be fabricated from original Lockheed drawings. The team tracked those drawings through Lockheed’s archives and private collectors. Some pieces had to be cast from scratch. Some systems had to be reverse-engineered from surviving components.

Finding two rebuilt Allison V-1710 engines in sufficient condition to trust on a first flight was its own years-long search through the warbird community. Every system in the aircraft was a problem to be solved rather than an item to be ordered.

Throughout the process, Roy Shoffner kept the project funded. His patience and financial commitment were the foundation the restoration rested on. Without a backer who understood that the work would take as long as it took, the aircraft would have remained in pieces. The restoration ran through the 1990s and into the early 2000s - the better part of a decade.

The team named her Glacier Girl. She went into the ice as a nameless Army Air Forces serial number and came out with a name she’d earned.

Glacier Girl’s First Flight: October 26, 2002

By the fall of 2002, she was ready. Steve Hinton climbed into the cockpit at Middlesboro-Bell County Airport in Kentucky - Roy Shoffner’s home airport, where the aircraft had been assembled after shipping from Chino.

Hinton ran his checklist. He was sitting in an aircraft whose engines had last run in the summer of 1942 - sixty years of silence.

He advanced the throttles. Both Allisons caught. Glacier Girl rolled, accelerated, and broke ground.

She flew her first post-restoration flight on October 26, 2002, completing a circuit of the pattern before Hinton brought her back down cleanly. First flight. After fifty years under the ice and ten years in the shop.

The following summer, Hinton flew her to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. When word spread through the North Forty that Glacier Girl was inbound, crowds came to the flight line. When she rolled out on downwind - both Allisons in sync, the twin-boom shape unmistakable at distance - the crowd understood exactly what it was seeing.

Why This Story Matters

Glacier Girl has been flying airshows ever since, based in Kentucky and maintained by a team that knows precisely what they have. She is one of only a handful of airworthy P-38 Lightnings remaining in the world, and the only one recovered from a glacier.

The larger lesson belongs to Pat Epps. A private pilot in Atlanta heard about eight aircraft under Greenland ice and decided he would go get one - without a government contract, museum endowment, or corporate sponsor. He had a pilot’s stubbornness and a conviction that most people in 1983 would have called foolishness.

Nine years later, he was standing on the Greenland ice cap watching his team haul pieces of a P-38 up through a 268-foot shaft.

The ice had those aircraft for fifty years. Pat Epps went and took one back.

Further reading: Mitchell Zuckoff’s book Frozen in Time covers the full story of the Lost Squadron and the recovery operation in depth.

Key Takeaways

On July 15, 1942, six P-38F Lightnings and two B-17E Flying Fortresses made emergency landings on the Greenland ice sheet during Operation Bolero; all twelve crew members survived uninjured.
Over fifty years, glacial compression buried the aircraft under 268 feet of ice and shifted them significantly from their original landing coordinates.
Atlanta pilot Pat Epps, backed ultimately by Roy Shoffner, funded years of search expeditions beginning around 1983 before the aircraft were located with radar in 1988 and physically recovered in 1992.
Fighter Rebuilders at Chino Airport spent the better part of a decade restoring Glacier Girl, fabricating parts from scratch and sourcing rebuilt Allison V-1710 engines through the warbird community.
Steve Hinton flew Glacier Girl’s first post-restoration flight on October 26, 2002, at Middlesboro-Bell County Airport in Kentucky - sixty years after the engines last ran.