Glacier Girl to finish aborted 1942 mission

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Glacier Girl to finish aborted 1942 mission




By Andrea Stone - USA Today
Posted : Tuesday Jun 19, 2007 6:55:25 EDT

After a World War II crash landing in Greenland, 50 years under ice and nearly $7 million in recovery and restoration costs, Glacier Girl is about to complete its mission.
On Friday, the vintage P-38 Lightning fighter will depart from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to finish what it started in 1942: a trans-Atlantic flight to England. This time, the only surviving relic of “The Lost Squadron” downed by bad weather will have thousands of people tracking its progress on the Internet.
Nearly 65 years after the Army Air Corps squadron of eight warplanes aborted its mission on Greenland’s ice cap, Glacier Girl’s weeklong journey will bring closure to “an Indiana Jones kind of story,” said Steven Hinton, the pilot who will fly the vintage warbird. He calls the flight a tribute to all World War II veterans and a way “to make everyone understand their story.”
For Brad McManus, at 89, the sole surviving pilot from the squadron, “It’s a thrill to know this is occurring and to think they are actually going to fly it over the same route that we flew in 1942.”
McManus will accompany Glacier Girl, which was flown by his late friend Harry Smith, as a passenger in a World War II P-51 Mustang fighter for the first 100 miles. It will be his first time in a military plane since he retired from the Air National Guard as a colonel in 1952.
The real estate developer from Phoenixville, Pa., was 2nd Lt. McManus on July 15, 1942, when he was part of one of the first flights of Operation Bolero, a massive transfer of military forces and equipment to Britain. McManus, who graduated from flying school the week Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, was piloting a P-38, one of six double-boomed, twin-engine fighters escorting two B-17 bombers.
The group was over Greenland on the way to a refueling stop in Iceland when the weather unexpectedly turned bad.
“We had no place to land,” McManus said. “It was pretty spooky. We were sweating it out.”
With five minutes of fuel left, he made an emergency landing on the ice cap.
“It looked like a solid sheet of concrete,” McManus said.
It wasn’t.
His landing gear sunk, flipping the plane and pinning the cockpit in the snow. He crawled out with only a minor scrape.
Learning from McManus’ misstep, the other pilots landed wheels up, sliding to a halt. All 25 pilots and crew members emerged unscathed.
Three days passed before the squadron’s SOS signals were picked up. Cargo planes parachuted supplies to the men, who huddled around heaters fashioned from empty oxygen bottles. After nine days, rescuers arrived on dogsleds to take them to a waiting Coast Guard cutter. The eight planes were abandoned.
The story didn’t end there. In 1992, a privately funded team located Smith’s mostly intact P-38 entombed beneath 268 feet of ice. Over four months, workers used a thermal generator to melt the ice and steam hoses to carve a cave around the wreckage before hoisting the fighter piece by piece to the surface.
McManus was there to watch the salvage effort.
“A very, very emotional experience,” he said. Much like Friday’s mission.
It follows a 10-year, $7 million restoration project spearheaded by the late Roy Shoffner, a Middlesboro, Ky., fast-food franchise owner and flying enthusiast. Glacier Girl has flown at air shows since its first post-thaw flight Oct. 26, 2002, but this is the first attempt to re-create its aborted World War II mission.
The 1942 mission was carried out without radar, with unreliable weather forecasting and a seven-frequency radio system. Hinton will be guided by Global Positioning System and have 720 radio frequencies to keep in touch. An accompanying P-51 flown by project director Ed Shipley will be equipped with satellite communications that will allow anyone to text-message the pilots during the flight. Real-time tracking will be available on AirShowBuzz.com.
If all goes as scheduled this time, Glacier Girl will arrive June 29 in Duxford, England, where it will be displayed with other classic planes at next month’s Flying Legends Air Show. The plane is one of just three P-38s still in flying condition, Hinton said.
“Of all the planes in the Air Force in World War II, the pilots loved the P-38 more than any other,” said McManus, adding that he is fortunate to have lived long enough to see Glacier Girl reach its original destination.
“It was good for acrobatics, had great range, speed,” he said. “It just was a great airplane to fly.”



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