US War Plane Rescued From Ice Finishes Mission

A fighter plane from the second world war that was dug out of almost 100 meters of snow and ice on Greenland has begun its final journey to England, completing a mission it began 65 years ago.

The P-38 fighter was part of the so-called "lost squadron", that set out for England on July 15 1942 but never completed the journey.

Six fighter planes, accompanied by two B-17 bombers, were forced to crash land on a glacier on the east side of Greenland after they hit bad weather and ran low on fuel.

All 25 crew were rescued, but the eight planes had to be left behind, and were gradually entombed in ice. One of the planes, dubbed Glacier Girl by the Kentucky adventurer who retrieved it, was located and brought out of the ice pack piece by piece in 1992 and restored.

The plane is due to arrive in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, on Friday. The lost squadron was part of an audacious plan codenamed Operation Bolero to transport fighter planes and bombers to England from America via Canada, Greenland and Iceland as part of the massive build up of allied forces in Britain.

The only surviving pilot from the lost squadron, Brad McManus, now aged 89, flew alongside the Glacier Girl for the first 100 miles of the journey to England. He kept a diary of the aborted mission, when he was just 24.

"Our squadron must be in England now," he wrote as he was waiting to be picked up off the glacier. "It is a shame that our trip had to end this way but we have so much to be thankful for. In a few days we will be back to some kind of civilization again where you can bathe and shave and eat green vegetables."

It took seven expeditions over 11 years, involving several different aviation explorers, to pull the plane out of the glacier.

Initial attempts from 1986 to drill down to the P-38 were frustrated; although they had the exact latitude and longitude of where it went down, radar showed that the plane was in fact a mile away from the original site.

It was unclear whether that was due to the movement over time of the glacier, or whether, as rumor suggested, wrong co-ordinates had been recorded having been radioed in from a German U2.

The twin-engine plane was one of the fastest planes of its time with a maximum speed of 400mph at 20,000ft.

It was finally brought out by Roy Shoffner, an explorer from Kentucky who died two years ago. Shoffner led a privately funded team of 40 people to retrieve the plane.

It had to be pulled out of 82 meters of ice, using a thermal generator and steam hoses to melt a space around the fighter before extracting it one piece at a time.