On 27 June 1969, a North American B-25 Mitchell lifted off from Fairbanks, Alaska, lost an engine moments later, and came down wheels-up on a sandbar in the middle of the Tanana River. Everyone walked away. The bomber did not.

Recovering it would have cost more than the airplane was worth, so it was simply left where it lay. For the next forty-four years, the river kept it — scoured by ice in winter, half-swallowed by silt in summer, stripped for parts by anyone who could reach the island. It earned a name that stuck: Sandbar Mitchell.

Today that same aircraft is in a heated workshop in Michigan, its skin coming back panel by panel, rebuilt largely by teenagers. It is one of the most quietly moving restoration stories in American aviation — and it is not finished yet.

A working airplane, not a museum piece

By 1969 the B-25 was a quarter-century old and long past its war. This one, serial 44-30733, had found a second career as a fire bomber, dropping retardant on Alaskan wildfires for operator Edgar Thorsrud. When the engine quit on takeoff, the pilot did the only thing he could and put it down on the nearest flat ground — which happened to be a river.

Bush Alaska is unsentimental about dead aircraft. The Mitchell became a landmark, then a curiosity, then almost a myth: a whole bomber sitting on an island in a river, going nowhere.

Fifteen people and a river

The rescue began with a phone call in January 2013. Patrick Mihalek and Todd Trainor tracked down locals in Fairbanks, then the aircraft's old mechanic, Jim Anderson, and confirmed the wreck was still there. A Kickstarter campaign raised around $20,000. That summer, a team of about fifteen — volunteers from Michigan and a couple of Alaskans — went in to free the bomber from the silt.

On 5 July 2013, after forty-four years, Sandbar Mitchell finally left the island. Then came a 3,700-mile road journey to the Warbirds of Glory Museum in Michigan, where the real work would begin.

"The Restorers" filmed the actual recovery of Sandbar Mitchell from the Tanana River in 2013.

Rebuilt by kids

Here is the part that turns a salvage job into something better. The restoration doubles as a mentorship programme. High-school apprentices — the museum's Kittyhawk Academy — work on the aircraft alongside experienced restorers, learning to read master assembly drawings, form ribs, heat-treat metal, and fit and paint parts they made themselves.

The most damaged section, the bomb bay, has been the hardest fight; decades of crash damage and scavenging left it a puzzle. A team travelled to AirCorps Aviation in Minnesota to press-form ribs on custom dies. By late 2024, project leader Patrick Mihalek reported the top of the bomb bay was around 98% complete.

The bottleneck is never enthusiasm. It is money and time — rare materials like L-channels and T-channels can take eight months to source. Mihalek puts it plainly.

A walkthrough of the ongoing restoration and the students doing the work.

Why bring it back at all

There are easier ways to own a flying B-25. You could restore a more complete airframe, or buy one already airworthy. The point of Sandbar Mitchell is not efficiency. It is that a bomber everyone had written off is being resurrected by the generation furthest from the war that built it — and that when it flies, it will carry them, and the veterans it honours, with it.

The full "resurrection of a forgotten B-25" story from the Commemorative Air Force.

Forty-four years in a river did not kill it. A river just made it wait for the right people to come looking.

Sources: Warbirds of Glory Museum; Vintage Aviation News (Spring 2025 restoration update); Anchorage Daily News (2013); b-25history.org.