Kee Bird the B-twenty-nine Superfortress that burned on a frozen Greenland lake after a fifty-year rescue mission

The Kee Bird was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that crash-landed on a frozen lake in northwest Greenland on February 21, 1947, during an Arctic reconnaissance mission. After sitting preserved in the ice for nearly five decades, a team led by legendary pilot Darryl Greenamyer spent three years restoring the bomber in place — only to watch it burn to its skeleton from a fuel-line fire moments before takeoff in 1995.

Why Was a B-29 Flying Over the Arctic in 1947?

In early 1947, the Cold War was barely a year old. The U.S. Army Air Forces (the Air Force wouldn’t become independent until September of that year) was running top-secret reconnaissance missions over the Arctic. The strategic logic was straightforward: if Soviet bombers ever launched toward the United States, they would come over the North Pole.

A B-29 crew of eleven men flew out of Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, on a polar navigation mission to map magnetic variations near the North Pole. At extreme northern latitudes, magnetic compasses behave erratically — wandering, giving false readings. The crew was gathering data on exactly how unreliable those instruments became.

On February 21, the compass errors and Arctic weather did their worst. The crew became lost over northwest Greenland. Fuel dropped. The sun was gone. In the Arctic in February, that meant 24 hours of darkness and temperatures around minus 50 degrees.

The Crash Landing on the Ice Cap

The aircraft commander made the decision no pilot wants to make: put the airplane down without an airfield. The crew found a frozen lake roughly 300 miles northwest of Thule, and the pilot brought the B-29 in gear-up, sliding on her belly across the ice.

All eleven crew members survived. Some sustained injuries, but no one died. It took the Air Force three days to locate them by air and nearly a week to evacuate everyone by sled and ski-equipped aircraft.

The crew went home. The airplane stayed behind.

How Did the B-29 Survive 48 Years in the Arctic?

The bomber was named Kee Bird after the Arctic ptarmigan, a bird that Greenland locals say cries “kee kee kee” in the frozen wind.

For decades, the Kee Bird sat on that frozen lake, buried by snow, uncovered by wind, then buried again. The dry, freezing Arctic air did what no museum hangar could match — it preserved the aircraft almost intact. The aluminum skin held. The engines, though exposed to brutal cold, didn’t corrode the way they would in a humid climate. Pilots who flew over the site occasionally reported the ghostly silhouette of a bomber sitting on white nothing.

Every time someone spotted her, the same question surfaced: could she fly again?

Who Was Darryl Greenamyer and Why Did He Attempt the Recovery?

In the early 1990s, Darryl Greenamyer decided to answer that question. Greenamyer was no amateur. He was a former Lockheed test pilot who held the world speed record for piston-powered aircraft, set in a modified Grumman F8F Bearcat at 483 miles per hour. He understood airplanes at a molecular level and possessed the kind of stubborn courage that borders on madness.

Greenamyer assembled a team of mechanics, engineers, and Arctic survival experts. He secured financing, sourced spare parts, and laid out a plan that sounded impossible: travel to the frozen lake, repair the Kee Bird in place, and fly her off the ice.

Everything — tools, engines, fuel, generators, supplies — had to be hauled in by ski-equipped C-130 Hercules or helicopter. There were no roads and no runways. The working window was six to eight weeks in the Arctic summer, when temperatures rose just enough to work barehanded for a few hours per day.

Three Years of Restoration on the Ice

1993: The first expedition dug the Kee Bird out of decades of packed snow. The belly landing had bent the underside, but the wings were straight, the fuselage intact, and the control surfaces still moved. The original Wright R-3350 engines, however, were destroyed by 46 years of extreme cold. Greenamyer sourced four replacement engines — not easy for a B-29 in the 1990s. The season ran out before the work was finished.

1994: The team returned for a second summer. More frozen fingers. More fabricating hydraulic lines on site. The crew lived in tents, ate military rations, and worked 16-hour days against relentless wind and cold. They hung new engines on the wings but again ran out of time.

1995: The third and final expedition. The team completed engine installations, repaired hydraulics, patched the belly skin, and rigged a makeshift set of landing gear skis. After nearly three years and close to a million dollars, every system check that could be done in a frozen field with no hangar had been done.

The Engines Start — and the Fire

Darryl Greenamyer climbed into the left seat of a B-29 that hadn’t flown since the Truman administration. He ran through the checklist and started the engines.

They ran.

Four Wright radial engines — 72 cylinders total — coughed to life on the ice after 48 years of silence. The ground crew cheered. Some cried. Greenamyer taxied across the lake, checked the controls, lined up on the smoothest stretch of ice, added power, and began the takeoff roll.

Then a fuel-fed auxiliary power unit in the aft fuselage malfunctioned. Accounts differ on whether a repaired fuel-line fitting leaked or the APU itself overheated. Either way, fuel met heat, and fire erupted in the rear of the airplane.

Greenamyer pulled the throttles back immediately. The crew scrambled out and fought the flames with hand-held extinguishers, but a fuel-fed fire inside an aluminum airframe — with no fire truck within 500 miles — was unwinnable.

The aluminum skin melted. The wings collapsed. The engines that had roared minutes earlier fell silent as their mounts burned through. By the time the fire burned out, the Kee Bird was a blackened skeleton on the ice, recognizable as a B-29 only by its outline.

No one was injured. But the loss was total.

What Remains of the Kee Bird Today?

The wreckage is still there. If you fly over that frozen lake in northwest Greenland, the scorched outline of a B-29 is still visible on the ice. The Arctic is slowly burying the remains under snow and time, but the bones of the Kee Bird persist — a monument to one of the most ambitious aircraft recovery attempts ever undertaken.

The entire saga was filmed by a documentary crew. PBS Nova aired the story as a special titled “B-29: Frozen in Time.” The footage of the engines starting is extraordinary. The footage of the fire is devastating.

Why the Kee Bird Story Still Matters

The margin of failure was agonizingly thin. The B-29 was rolling, the engines were turning, and the sky was right there. One leaking fitting in an auxiliary power unit took it all away, seconds from success.

What defines the people who restore historic aircraft is the willingness to lose — to pour years, money, and heart into a project that might end in smoke, and do it anyway because the airplane deserves the attempt. Greenamyer and his team knew the risks. They tried regardless.

Key Takeaways

The Kee Bird B-29 crash-landed in Greenland on February 21, 1947, after its crew became lost during an Arctic reconnaissance mission; all 11 crew members survived.
The Arctic’s dry, freezing air preserved the aircraft for nearly five decades, keeping the aluminum skin and airframe largely intact.
Darryl Greenamyer’s team spent three summers (1993–1995) and nearly $1 million restoring the bomber on a remote frozen lake with no infrastructure.
The engines successfully started and the aircraft began its takeoff roll, but a fuel-line fire in the aft fuselage destroyed the airplane before it could leave the ice.
The wreckage remains visible on the Greenland ice cap today, and the PBS Nova documentary “B-29: Frozen in Time” preserves the full story on film.