chatarra

“Around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time today, a World War II-era P-38 Lightning fighter plane is set to take off from Teterboro Airport in northeastern New Jersey, bound for Duxford, England — where it is almost 65 years overdue.

The plane was one of six P-38s and two B-17 bombers on their way to help shore up the defenses of the British Isles in July 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor, when bad weather blocked them first from reaching a refueling base in Iceland and then from making it back to their previous stop in western Greenland. The pilots wound up having to make emergency landings on Greenland’s ice cap, where they were spotted by air and rescued by dogsled teams three days later.

Glaciergirl Greenland’s harsh climate soon buried the planes in snow and ice – almost 270 feet of it, eventually — so though the rough whereabouts of what came to be called the Lost Squadron were known, the planes were not precisely located until 1983. Nine years later - when they had been icebound for 50 years - an expedition succeeded in burrowing down to one of the P-38s.”

(via Telstar Logics)