Recovery of
Glacier Girl
On
July 15, 1992, fifty years to the day later, 74-year-old Brad
McManus stood on the ice cap surrounded by the recovered pieces of
his late friend Harry Smith's P‑38, as chronicled in the documentary
"The Lost Squadron" (see right column), and was flooded with memories of his
wartime experience and the lifetime friendships that he held dear
to his heart. A new mission was about to begin.
The Greenland Expedition for which Bob Cardin was the Project
Manager, and the one that was successful in recovering one of the
planes, was actually the 13th expedition to go looking for the
Lost Squadron, beginning in 1983.
This is a portion of the picture the expedition members used to
determine which of the P‑38s they would try to recover. You
can see from the photo that the props are intact. When Smith
landed her, he feathered the props which (50 years later) enabled
the crew to recover the engines and all of the propeller blades except one.
Good job, Harry!
Next on the checklist? Getting the plane to the surface.
How do you get a P‑38 out of
the ice? Simple...melt the ice!
Well, maybe not as simple as
that, seeing how it was 268 feet of ice. Basically, you start with
a six-digit budget, followed by transporting tons of equipment
that include arctic survival gear and heavy construction
machinery, and top it all off with adventure-minded individuals
willing to take the hardships and risks associated with
one-of-a-kind expeditions to a hostile environment. That's what it
took to recover a P-38 from "The Lost Squadron."
 The contraption designed to burrow through the ice looks like a
technologically advanced spinning top. It's called the Super
Gopher -- a thermal meltdown generator -- and melts the ice by
circulating hot water from a collector and pumping it through
copper tubing coiled around the outside. The four-foot-wide device
is suspended over the area to be tunneled through by a hoist and
chain, being lowered at a rate of about two feet per hour. The
water created is pumped out through a hose coupled to a
submersible pump.
When the Gopher completed melting its 268-foot-deep shaft it was
winched out of the hole and set aside. The hole took the better
part of a month to complete. The descent to the bottom of the ice
hole took twenty-five minutes. Men equipped with steam hoses were
lowered in to carve out a cave surrounding the aircraft. Water
created from this was constantly pumped out, as workers had to
slog through ice water to keep the project moving along.
Salvaging the P-38 from the glacier took long hours of hard work,
all of which had to be
performed in cramped surroundings in a rain of melting water and
chunks of ice that periodically fell from the cavern roof. There
were several tense moments when the striking of a chisel sent
cracks like bolts of lightning running through the roof of the ice
cavern.
Once the cavern was completed, the task of disassembling the plane
lay ahead.
Technicians began to take the P-38 apart piece by piece.
Propellers had to be removed, the wings had to be disconnected,
the fuselage disassembled; every part of the plane was
scrutinized, logged and recorded and then hoisted to the surface.
The last section of the aircraft, the center section, was
seventeen feet by twenty-one feet and weighed seven-thousand
pounds. It, too, had to travel the 268 feet to the surface.
Attached to the plane were cables that ran up to several winches.
The bulk of the lifting was done by one very powerful manually
operated hoist. Using it required applying great pressure
uniformly, and it turned out that only one member of the team had
the necessary strength for the job. The crank required four
turns for every quarter-inch rise.
Several people on the surface were needed to monitor the various
other winches, and someone had to ride on the plane section to
make sure it came up evenly and avoid any obstacles in the shaft.
The raising of this section took almost two full days.
After reaching the surface, the crew had to be extremely careful
removing the section from the hoist, as a mishap at this point
would send the huge section plunging down the shaft. Due to the
limited height of the hoisting frame, the crew had to dig away a
ramp on one side of the shaft onto which the plane could be pulled
and released. Once done and out of the hole, a bottle of champagne
was opened and signed by the remaining team members and dropped
down the shaft. The recovery took four months to complete.
Arrangements were made to take their cargo
back to the states. A Sikorsky S-51, a heavy-duty cargo copter,
was employed to carry the center section to a sea port where two
weeks later the section was loaded onto a Danish ship that carried
it to Denmark, and eventually to the docks at Savannah, Georgia.
From there it was delivered to project funder Roy Shoffner's
hangar in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where the restoration began.
|
RESTORATION OF GLACIER GIRL
|
 |
|
