Glacier Girl: The Story of the Impossible Plane

It seems that Captain America wasn't the only one who got buried under tons of ice during World War 2 and got successfully recommissioned 50 years later.Show more

During WW2, America made a squadron of airplanes to be flown across the Atlantic in the fight against the Nazis. In 1945, 6 of the airplanes had to make an emergency landing on Greenland due to the bad weather. The pilots were all rescued, but the airplanes had to be left behind and unrecovered for decades.

Fast forward 50 years into the future, a group of aviation enthusiasts went back to the Greenland in an attempt to recover the aircrafts. Time has made the airplanes drift a mile and were now buried under 27 stories of ice.

The team invented a machine they called Super Gopher, which pumped superheated water to drill a hole through the ice and reach the airplanes. The one plane they found most intact got dismantled and brought up back to the surface. They called her Glacier Girl. Each piece of the craft traveled 20 minuted up to the surface along the narrow shaft. The last and heaviest piece, weighing 3 tonnes, saw the first light of day of 50 years on August 1st, 1992.

in 2002, Glacier Girl was completely reconstructed and able to lift off the ground once more.