restoration spotlight

Glacier Girl is a P-38F Lightning (serial number 42-67543) that made an emergency landing on the Greenland ice cap on July 15, 1942, sank to a depth of nearly 270 feet over the following five decades, and was recovered and restored to airworthy condition - flying again on October 26, 2002, sixty years after it last left the ground. All 25 crew members from the original landing survived. The aircraft almost didn’t.

How Did a P-38 End Up Under the Greenland Ice Cap?

Operation Bolero was the U.S. Army Air Forces’ plan to ferry combat aircraft to England via the northern route in 1942. The path ran from the eastern seaboard through Labrador, across Greenland, on to Iceland, then Britain. On paper it was efficient. In practice, Greenland’s ice cap sits at nearly 9,000 feet above sea level, and the weather there changes without warning.

On July 15, 1942, a formation launched from Bluie West One - the American air base at Narsarsuaq on Greenland’s southern tip. The group consisted of six P-38F Lightnings from the 94th Fighter Squadron and two B-17 Flying Fortresses acting as navigation guides. The destination was Bluie West Eight on the east coast, then Iceland.

The weather closed in hard. Cloud cover dropped to the surface. Headwinds exceeded the forecast. Fuel became critical. The formation leader made the only viable call: emergency landing on the ice cap. All eight aircraft descended through the overcast and put down on a flat stretch of glacier near Koge Bay on the southeastern coast.

The landings were rough - unprepared ice, full military aircraft, unknown surface conditions. But all eight aircraft got down. More importantly, all 25 crew members walked away. Rescue aircraft found them within days. The crews left frostbitten and shaken. The aircraft stayed behind.

Why the Army Didn’t Go Back for Them

There was a war on. Recovery was never seriously considered. The Army Air Forces wrote off all eight aircraft, the crews were evacuated, and the mission moved on.

The Greenland ice cap does not hold anything in place. Snowfall accumulates every winter. The weight of new ice compresses the layers beneath it. The glacier itself moves continuously, flowing slowly toward the sea. The aircraft, resting on the surface in July 1942, began to sink - a few feet per year, season after season, decade after decade.

They also moved with the glacier, eventually drifting roughly three miles from the original landing site. By the time anyone thought seriously about recovery, the aircraft were under more than 250 feet of solid ice. Later surveys put the depth closer to 270 feet - enough ice that you could stack five P-38 Lightnings end-to-end and still not reach the surface from where those aircraft sat.

Who Found the Lost Squadron?

Pat Epps was an Atlanta-based pilot who ran Epps Aviation at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. The story of what people had begun calling the Lost Squadron had been pulling at him for years. In 1981, he partnered with fellow pilot and businessman Richard Taylor and began planning a serious recovery effort.

Finding the aircraft was the first obstacle. The glacier’s surface offers no visual clues. The ice had carried the formation roughly three miles from the landing site, and the Lost Squadron had no fixed address.

Epps and Taylor mounted multiple expeditions through the 1980s using ground-penetrating radar and sonar techniques adapted for ice penetration. They dragged sensors across the surface looking for returns from buried metallic objects. The work was expensive, physically brutal, and conducted in one of the world’s most unforgiving environments.

In 1988, they found them. Radar returns came back from a cluster of objects buried deep in the ice, positioned three miles downglacier from the original landing site. One P-38 showed up particularly clearly on the survey. That aircraft would be named Glacier Girl.

How Do You Extract an Aircraft from 270 Feet of Ice?

No conventional approach works at that depth. A standard excavation shaft would collapse under the lateral pressure of the glacier. Explosives were out of the question.

The recovery team developed a device they called the Gopher - a thermal lance that circulated heated water to melt a cylindrical shaft downward through the ice. The Gopher descended, melted its way forward, descended again. Progress was measured in feet per session.

The operation could only run during Greenland’s brief summer window - roughly six to eight weeks per year. Each winter, the glacier closed back around the shaft, and the team had to reopen it the following season. The ice is patient, and it exerts enormous lateral pressure on everything inside it.

Roy Shoffner, a businessman from Middlesboro, Kentucky, provided the financial backing that made sustained recovery viable. Without his investment across multiple seasons, the project would almost certainly have run out of money before reaching the aircraft.

By 1992, the team had reached one of the P-38s.

What Condition Was Glacier Girl In When They Reached Her?

Fifty years of ice pressure had done visible damage. The fuselage was distorted. Some components were crushed flat. The canopy was gone. The aircraft had settled and shifted in ways that reflected decades of slow, relentless force.

But the structure was there. The twin tail booms that make a P-38 Lightning instantly recognizable were intact. The distinctive silhouette was still readable. Glacier Girl was still, unmistakably, an airplane.

Recovery required dismantling the aircraft inside the shaft, hauling components to the surface piece by piece, cataloging everything, and airlifting parts out of Greenland - the same methodical patience that found her brought her home.

How Was a Severely Compressed P-38 Restored to Flying Condition?

The P-38 Lightning was the most complex single-seat fighter the Army Air Forces operated in World War II. A central nacelle housed the pilot, guns, and nose gear, flanked by twin tail booms each containing a turbo-supercharged Allison V-12 liquid-cooled engine. The propellers ran counter-rotating - the right turning clockwise, the left counter-clockwise - to eliminate the torque and P-factor that made some contemporary fighters genuinely hazardous to fly. At altitude, she was capable of better than 400 miles per hour.

Restoring Glacier Girl meant starting nearly from scratch on every system. The Allison engines required complete rebuilds. Instruments, hydraulic systems, and electrical systems all had to be rebuilt to airworthy standard. Components that hadn’t been manufactured in decades had to be reverse-engineered from factory drawings and surviving examples.

The cold had actually preserved the aluminum better than saltwater or tropical humidity would have. But preserved is not the same as functional - every component had to be proven airworthy, not just structurally present.

The restoration took approximately 10 years, conducted at multiple facilities by people who understood they were finishing a story that started over the Greenland coast in July 1942.

October 26, 2002: Glacier Girl Flies Again

Steve Hinton, one of the most experienced warbird pilots in the world, was at the controls for the first flight. The Allisons spun up. The counter-rotating props bit the air. Glacier Girl climbed.

The P-38 produces a sound unlike any other aircraft flying today. The counter-rotating propellers generate a note that is almost musical - distinct from any single-engine airplane, distinct from most twins. At cruise, the Allisons carry a low, authoritative thrum. At full power, you feel it as much as hear it.

Sixty years of silence, and that sound came back.

Glacier Girl has flown the airshow circuit since her restoration. She is one of a tiny handful of P-38 Lightnings still airworthy anywhere in the world. Most surviving examples are static museum displays. The postwar surplus disposal programs of the late 1940s were unsentimental - tens of thousands of aircraft were scrapped because the aluminum was worth more than the history. The fact that serial number 42-67543 came back from the ice is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.

The Decision That Brought Her Home

When the recovery effort began in 1981, Glacier Girl had been under the ice for nearly 40 years. The pilots who’d flown those aircraft had long since moved on. The war was won. There was no contract, no government program, no museum mandate requiring anyone to recover anything.

Two civilian pilots decided the story mattered. That conviction - sustained by Roy Shoffner’s financial commitment across multiple Greenland summers - is what brought Glacier Girl home.

A formation landed on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942, all 25 crew members survived, and 60 years later one of those aircraft flew again. Both outcomes resulted from someone making the right call under pressure, and someone else refusing to let the history stay buried.

Key Takeaways

• July 15, 1942: Six P-38F Lightnings and two B-17s made emergency landings on the Greenland ice cap during Operation Bolero. All 25 crew members survived and were evacuated within days.
• The aircraft sank several feet per year and moved roughly three miles with the glacier, reaching a depth of approximately 270 feet by the time they were located.
• Pat Epps and Richard Taylor began recovery efforts in 1981 and located the aircraft using ground-penetrating radar in 1988 - 46 years after the landing.
• A thermal melting device called the Gopher was developed to access the aircraft through the ice; recovery was completed in 1992 across multiple summer-only seasons, funded significantly by Roy Shoffner.
• After approximately 10 years of restoration, Glacier Girl flew again on October 26, 2002, piloted by Steve Hinton - making her one of the few airworthy P-38 Lightnings in existence.