Glacier Girl, the P-38 Lightning Buried Under Two Hundred and Sixty-Eight Feet of Greenland Ice, and the Ten-Year Restoration That Brought a Lost Squadron Fighter Back to the Sky

A P-38 Lightning that emergency-landed on the Greenland ice cap on July 15, 1942 spent the next fifty years being compressed under 268 feet of glacial ice - deeper than a twenty-story building is tall. In 1992, a recovery team melted their way down to it, cut it apart in a shaft barely wide enough for a man, and hauled it to the surface piece by piece. By October 26, 2002, that same aircraft - designated Glacier Girl - climbed off the runway at Chino, California under her own power.

The Emergency Landing That Stranded Eight Aircraft

Operation Bolero was the massive Allied effort to ferry American aircraft across the North Atlantic to England in preparation for the air war over Europe. On July 15, 1942, a flight of six P-38 Lightnings and two Boeing B-17Es was crossing the Denmark Strait when a wall of cloud and ice moved in from the Greenland interior. Visibility dropped to zero.

The formation leader ordered a reversal, but the weather had already closed their alternate, Bluie West Eight on Greenland’s southwest coast. The eight aircraft were burning irreplaceable fuel over an ice cap that offered no options.

The leader picked a heading and descended through the overcast. In a whiteout, with altimeters unable to distinguish sea level from eight thousand feet of glacial plateau, the pilots broke into the clear above flat ice and put down one after another - gear extended, props still turning. All twenty-five crew members survived and were rescued over the following days. The aircraft were inventoried, stripped of portable equipment, and abandoned. The War Department wrote them off.

Why the Aircraft Didn’t Just Sit on the Surface

This is the detail that separates Glacier Girl’s story from an ordinary wartime wreck. Aircraft that crash in fields corrode and scatter. Aircraft buried under a moving glacier do something different.

Greenland’s ice cap receives fifteen to twenty feet of snowfall annually. Each year’s accumulation compresses the layers beneath it, converting snow to ice. The eight aircraft of the Lost Squadron didn’t rust on the surface - they were slowly incorporated into the glacier itself, compressed by the weight of every subsequent winter. The ice cap also flows toward the coast. By the time serious recovery efforts began in the 1980s, the aircraft had migrated roughly a mile and a half from their original landing coordinates.

How Pat Epps and Richard Taylor Started the Search

Pat Epps, an Atlanta aviation businessman, became consumed with the idea of recovering one of those P-38s in the early 1980s. He and fellow Atlanta pilot Richard Taylor pulled together every documentary thread available: original Army Air Forces accident reports, rescue crew photographs from 1942, and the emergency landing navigator’s notes.

They made multiple expeditions to Greenland, camping on the ice and running ground-penetrating radar. Early readings put the aircraft at 75 feet. Later readings pushed that to 150 feet. By the late 1980s, the measurements were definitive: the Lost Squadron was buried under more than 250 feet of compacted glacial ice.

The 1992 Recovery: Building the Super Gopher

Roy Shoffner, a Kentucky businessman and pilot, funded the 1992 recovery expedition with the resources the project demanded. The engineering challenge was straightforward to describe and brutal to execute: melt a shaft more than two hundred feet into solid ice, work in it, and bring an aircraft up through it.

The team’s solution was a heated element lowered on a cable - internally called the “super gopher” - that melted its way downward at approximately one foot per hour, running continuously. After days of operation, they broke through to the aircraft at 268 feet.

The glacier had been both destructive and preserving. Compressive weight had crushed canopies and bent structure. But the environment - cold, dark, sealed from oxygen exchange and humidity variation - had protected aluminum remarkably well. Instruments still had their glass. Metal structure that had been there since 1942 was still there.

The team selected one P-38F for recovery: serial number 41-7630. Getting her out meant cutting her apart in a shaft roughly four feet across, in extreme cold, two hundred and sixty-eight feet underground. Piece by piece, the sections were rigged to cables and hauled to the surface.

The Restoration at Fighter Rebuilders, Chino

The sections of Glacier Girl moved first to Shoffner’s storage in Middlesboro, Kentucky, then to Fighter Rebuilders in Chino, California - the restoration operation associated with the Planes of Fame Air Museum, run by Steve Hinton. Fighter Rebuilders did not do cosmetic work. They returned aircraft to genuine airworthiness.

What Hinton’s team received was an engineering puzzle compounded by scarcity. The Allison V-1710 engines specific to early P-38F variants had not survived five decades of compression and freeze-thaw cycling. Sourcing replacement new-old-stock engines required months of searching through barns, warehouses, and stalled restoration projects.

The P-38F was one of the most mechanically complex fighters of the Second World War: counter-rotating Allison engines to eliminate torque, a central nacelle housing pilot and armament, twin tail booms with a distinctive dual-tail surface, and tricycle landing gear at a time when most fighters still ran tailwheels. The wiring diagram alone required weeks of study for a wartime ground crew chief. Rebuilding those systems from glacier-recovered sections - not to static display standard, but to flying standard - took ten years.

The First Flight: October 26, 2002

On October 26, 2002, Steve Hinton climbed into Glacier Girl’s cockpit at Chino, ran the pre-start checklist, and brought the Allisons online for the first time since 1942.

When the engines caught, people who had worked the restoration for the better part of a decade were standing on the ramp. The sound of two Allisons running together after fifty years in a glacier does something to people who have been close to the project. Hinton flew her as designed - gear up, both engines pulling, the twin-boom silhouette cutting across a California sky.

She didn’t fly tentatively. She flew like a P-38.

Where Glacier Girl Flies Today

Glacier Girl is currently owned by Rod Lewis of San Antonio, Texas, who flies her at airshows across the country. An aircraft that was buried under 268 feet of Greenland ice in 1942 is today making low passes over American airshow crowds.

That matters beyond spectacle. Every warbird that flies is primary evidence of what these aircraft actually were - not photographs, not scale drawings, but the real thing at full power fifty yards away. The scale, the exhaust heat, the noise of two Allisons in synchrony. A museum display conveys what an aircraft looked like. A flying restoration conveys what it was.

The men who walked away from Glacier Girl on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942 did not know they were leaving behind a fifty-year project. Some lived long enough to learn she had been recovered. A few lived long enough to know she was flying again.

Key Takeaways

• July 15, 1942: Six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17Es made forced landings on the Greenland ice cap during Operation Bolero; all 25 crew members survived.
• Annual snowfall compressed the aircraft into the glacier - by the time recovery began, they were buried under 268 feet of ice and had drifted roughly 1.5 miles from their original position.
• Roy Shoffner funded the 1992 recovery; the team used a heated cable tool called the “super gopher” to melt a shaft downward at approximately one foot per hour.
• Serial number 41-7630 was selected for recovery, cut apart underground, and hauled to the surface in sections - later restored by Steve Hinton and Fighter Rebuilders in Chino, California.
• October 26, 2002: Glacier Girl flew for the first time since 1942; she is currently owned by Rod Lewis and remains an active airshow aircraft.