Once-Lost Wartime P-38 to Complete England Mission

TETERBORO, New Jersey (AP) -- A World War II fighter plane once entombed under nearly 300 feet of snow and ice in Greenland is taking to the skies again to complete the mission it began nearly 65 years ago.

The P-38, dubbed "Glacier Girl" after being recovered, was scheduled to take off from New Jersey on Friday for another leg of a journey to Duxford, England. It should arrive there on June 29.

The plane was part of a group that became known as the Lost Squadron. Brad McManus, 89, the last living pilot from the mission, will be flying alongside for the first 100 miles as a passenger in a small private Piper Cheyenne plane.

The restored P-38, once one of the fastest aircraft on the planet with a top speed of more than 400 mph, arrived at Teterboro Airport on Thursday, 15 miles northwest of New York City.

The Lost Squadron was part of a daring plan -- Operation Bolero -- that eventually brought hundreds of U.S. fighter jets and bombers to England via Canada, Greenland and Iceland in the early months after America's entry into World War II.

The route was chosen because the planes lacked the proper navigational and communications equipment to make the direct trans-Atlantic flight on their own. It was considered a faster alternative to having the planes disassembled and shipped to England in convoys that were targets of U-boat attacks.

But Glacier Girl, along with five other fighters and two bombers, did not make it. Foul weather forced them to make a crash landing on a glacier in Greenland on July 15, 1942. The crews were rescued, but the planes were left behind.

The aircraft sank into the river of ice and were untouched until a Kentucky man, Roy Shoffner, led an expedition of 40 people in the spring of 1992. They burrowed through 268 feet of ice to reach one of the P-38s.

The twin-engine plane was extracted, piece by piece, through a 4-foot wide tunnel. Shoffner spent years restoring it, and it took flight again in October 2002.

Shoffner died in 2005. His family sold the P-38 in March 2007 to Lewis Aeronautical, a private company in San Antonio, Texas, which owns a collection of historic aircraft. The family said the sale was needed to realize Shoffner's dream that the plane would finish its mission, and to ensure its long-term preservation.

In a nod to Shoffner's efforts, Glacier Girl's first stop on its tour this month was in his home town of Middlesboro, Kentucky, where it arrived June 18 from Chino, California.

After leaving New Jersey, Glacier Girl is to make stops in Presque Isle, Maine; Goose Bay and Frobisher Bay in Canada; Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland; and Reykjavik, Iceland; before reaching England.

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