On the morning of 15 July 1942, eight American warplanes went hunting for a break in the weather over the North Atlantic and found the roof of the world instead. They had left Greenland at first light, bound for Iceland and then the war in Europe, but a wall of cloud turned them back. Low on fuel, boxed in by fog and mountains, the pilots had one option left: put down on the ice cap below. One by one, six twin-tailed fighters and two bombers settled onto a glacier off Greenland’s southeast coast, and the war moved on without them.

The fighters were P-38 Lightnings, barely two months old. The Germans called the type the fork-tailed devil; this particular one, serial 41-7630, had flown just 72 hours. Its pilot, Lt. Harry Smith, was the last of the Lightnings to touch down, greasing a wheels-up belly landing onto the snow. In his logbook he scribbled a line that still makes mechanics grin: “Best damn crate I ever damn saw.”

A wrong turn over the ice

The first man down, Brad McManus, flipped his P-38 onto its back when the gear caught the ice. He walked away without a scratch. So did everyone else. All 25 airmen survived the landings, and for more than a week they camped on the glacier while a rescue party trekked in. Then they hiked to the coast, and a Coast Guard vessel carried them home. The planes were left where they sat. The “Lost Squadron,” people started calling them, though at the time they looked less lost than simply abandoned, a footnote in a war that was making footnotes by the thousand.

Greenland had other plans. The corner of ice where the squadron came down catches enormous snowfall that never melts. Winter after winter, the drifts packed down into glacier, and the airplanes sank with them, slowly, silently, deeper every year.

Fifty winters of snow

By the time anyone came looking, the Lost Squadron had earned its name. In 1980, two Atlanta businessmen and lifelong aviation romantics, Pat Epps and Richard Taylor, decided they would find the planes and fly one home. They pictured the fighters sitting on the surface, ready to be swept off and started up. What they got instead was a decade of heartbreak: more than a dozen expeditions, ground-penetrating radar, clashing egos, and nearly a million dollars, all to establish one humbling fact. The squadron was not on the ice. It was under it, far deeper than anyone had dared to guess.

When the radar finally pinned down Harry Smith’s Lightning, the number was almost absurd. The airplane lay roughly 268 feet below the surface, the height of a 25-storey building, entombed in solid glacier. The two B-17s had been crushed flat by the pressure. But the little P-38, sheltered somehow by the ice around it, appeared to be whole.

Melting a hole to 1942

You do not dig 268 feet through a glacier. You melt it. The team, now backed by Kentucky businessman Roy Shoffner, built a contraption they nicknamed the Super Gopher: a ring of copper tubing that circulated hot water and sank through the ice at about two feet an hour. It took the better part of a month to bore the shaft. The descent to the bottom took 25 minutes.

Down there, in a cavern carved by steam and constantly filling with meltwater, the recovery crew took the airplane apart by hand. Chunks of ice fell from the roof. They logged and hoisted every piece up the shaft, the last and largest a seven-thousand-pound centre section that rode a hand-cranked hoist to daylight. When it finally cleared the hole in August 1992, the team opened a bottle, signed it, and dropped it back down the shaft as an offering to the glacier. Fifty years and two weeks after Harry Smith set her down, the Lightning was out.

A decade in a Kentucky hangar

Getting her out of the ice turned out to be the easy part. The airplane arrived at Roy Shoffner’s hangar in Middlesboro, Kentucky, in pieces, and the man who took charge of putting her back together was Bob Cardin, a blunt former Army helicopter pilot who had managed the recovery. He figured on eighteen months and 600,000 dollars. He was off by about eight years and three and a half million dollars.

Every single piece of the plane was broken. P-38s were so rare by the 1990s that parts had to be hunted across the country or fabricated from scratch off Lockheed blueprints borrowed from the Smithsonian. Cardin traded two rare tyres for a single propeller blade. Volunteers made long round trips. The hangar door stayed open to anyone curious, and eventually tens of thousands of people a year wandered through to watch a legend being reassembled, rivet by rivet.

Plenty of people, including both men’s wives, thought Cardin and Shoffner had lost their minds. The money kept going in and the airplane kept not flying. But Shoffner, a former Air Force pilot who had loved Lightnings since he was a boy, never blinked.

The day she woke up

On 26 October 2002, almost exactly ten years after she came out of the glacier, the airplane was ready. They had named her Glacier Girl during the celebration on the ice. Now, restored with about 80 percent of her original parts, she sat on a runway in Middlesboro while some 25,000 people, roughly double the town’s population, crowded the fences.

Test pilot Steve Hinton climbed in, ran up the two Allison V-12s, and lifted off into the Kentucky sky. Witnesses describe a smooth, muffled purr, and then a P-38 was banking over a small Appalachian town for the first time in sixty years. Grown men who had flown Lightnings in the war stood on the ground and wept.

Glacier Girl still flies. She has crossed the country to air shows and, in 2007, even tried to complete her original 1942 journey across the Atlantic, only to be turned back once more, this time by a coolant leak at Goose Bay. She never made it to Britain. Somehow that feels right. She was never really meant for that war. She was meant to be the one that came back, the proof that something can vanish under 268 feet of ice for half a century and still, against every reasonable expectation, come home and fly.

Raising a P-38 from 268 feet of Greenland ice.

Sources: Wikipedia (Glacier Girl); Carl Hoffman, "Glacier Girl," Smithsonian Air & Space; P-38 National Association; Wikimedia Commons.