42 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot
was minimal, as the inner fjord was fed by water runoff
from the ice cap rather than the salty North Atlantic.
However you arrive in Narsarsuaq, the people are
great, the service is excellent, and there’s even a com-
fortable Scandinavian-style hotel on the airport if you
decide to stay over. Once, a few years back, I stayed
there for five days waiting for weather to clear so I could
make the next leg to Reykjavik. I was flying a new Maule
M6-260 on amphibious floats that accumulate ice like
you wouldn’t believe, and IFR was out of the question.
Oh, yes, one other thing about Narsarsuaq and
most other Greenland airports: Fuel costs $17/gallon.
Another feature of the Greenland ice cap is the
Distant Early Warning radar network, better known
in the ’60s and ’70s as the DEW line. It was established
during the Cold War. There were three radar stations
built out on the cap, code-named Sea Bass, Sob Story
and Big Gun. These dome-shaped, top-secret radar
facilities were built near or above the 10,000-foot level
of the cap and looked predominately north toward
Russia across the North Pole. They were resupplied by
ski-equipped Lockheed C-130s and helicopters staged
primarily out of another U.S. base at Sondrestrom Fjord,
400 miles north of Narsarsuaq, also on Greenland’s west
coast. All three radars have long been decommissioned.
It’s hard to imagine what manner of behavior could
earn a G.I. an extended stay at any of those facilities,
but being stationed on top of the Greenland ice cap
must have been regarded as the most boring, if not
necessarily the toughest, duty in the military.
Another interesting sidebar to the Greenland story
is the saga of a P-38 Lightning being ferried across
the Atlantic to Europe in the early days of WWII. The
airplane was part of a flight consisting of six P-38s and
two Boeing B-17s. The group departed Sondrestrom,
destination Reykjavik, and encountered severe fog
and poor weather conditions over the Davis Strait. All
eight aircraft turned back toward Greenland, only to
discover the weather had closed done behind them.
With little other choice, all eight airplanes were forced
to land on the ice cap.
No one was hurt in the forced landings on the flat
surface of the ice, and all pilots and crew were rescued
a few days later. When the war ended, there was noincentive to salvage the airplanes, so they were aban-
doned out on the cap. All eight warbirds were gradu-
ally entombed by the years of storms and shifting ice.
Inevitably, someone decided to bring up one of the
P-38s, and the recovery finally succeeded, as I wrote
in this magazine in 2007: “Warbird expert Bob Cardin
led a team of adventurers onto the ice to recover one
of the airplanes. The 10th expedition to make the
effort, Cardin’s group battled blizzard conditions and
minus-20 degrees F temperatures and finally succeeded
in retrieving a partially crushed P-38 from 266 feet
below the surface of the ice. The team transported
the disassembled airplane by ski-equipped DC-3 to
the Greenland port of Kulusuk and shipped (the P-38)
to Savannah, GA.”
The full story of the recovery, transport and even-
tual restoration of that P-38 could fill the rest of this
magazine, but San Antonio oilman Rod Lewis eventu-
ally purchased the airplane, named Glacier Girl, and
decided to complete the trip to Duxford, England, for
the Flying Legends Airshow. Duxford was the original
destination planned in 1942.
I joined Rod Lewis’ trans-Atlantic team as a result
of my association with Steve Hinton, a well-known test
pilot, unlimited race pilot and owner of the Planes of
Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. At the time,
Hinton was the only pilot insured to fly Glacier Girl,
and he felt the team needed someone along who knew
a little about flying the ocean. Since I knew as little as
anyone, I was hired as a consultant.
Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to Duxford on
that trip. Bad weather in England intervened, and I
wound up flying home from Reykjavik. Today, it goes
much better, and we arrive safely in the surprisingly
friendly conditions.
Nevertheless, for all you wannabe warbird owners
out there who have a few million dollars to spend, be
advised that there are still two B-17s and five P-38s just
waiting to be retrieved from 250-300 feet of glaciated
snow and ice on top of the Greenland ice cap. PPYou can read the original 2007 article on Glacier Girl’s first attempt to
return to Greenland and cross the Atlantic at https://www.planeand
pilotmag.com/article/the-odyssey-of-glacier-girl/#.XQJ_xi2ZORs.