More news on the planned flight to the UK from the local paper.
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_5469897,00.html (register free)
Glacier Girl back in her element
WWII fighter plane ready to take to air, finish mission as she warms hearts of fans
By FRED BROWN,
brownf@knews.com
April 7, 2007
Created in the iron might of America at war, the P-38 Lightning F fighter rolled off assembly lines in 1942, and one in particular had a date with destiny.
Restored to her days of promised glory, the P-38 known to thousands of fans as Glacier Girl flew again in 2002, six decades after she crashed-landed, storm tossed and fuel tanks spent, on the foreboding frozen surface of Greenland.
Recent news of her sale by the family that owned and renovated her has been tempered by recognition that East Tennesseans may see her fly for the last time on a brief return trip this summer.
"She has flown away, but just think how many more people are going to see her now and how many more veterans will get to see her," said Bob Long of Knoxville, a longtime friend and business partner of J. Roy Shoffner, the Middlesboro, Ky., entrepreneur who restored Glacier Girl.
"This was Roy's project, and he's gone," said Long, a World War II B-24 bomber pilot with 32 missions to his credit. "The family can't keep up the costs of insurance and maintenance and its flying program. The people who bought it have the wherewithal to fly it and show it all over the nation."
'The crown jewel'
Roy Shoffner, who died in 2005, saved the exotic World War II fighter, and his son Jay says it was his father's dream for Glacier Girl to complete her original mission across the North Atlantic to Scotland's western coast, near Glasgow.
The plane was part of the Lost Squadron, eight P-38s and two B-17 bombers on their way from Maine to Europe that ran into foul weather over Greenland. The squadron was forced to land on the ice, and only Glacier Girl was not damaged beyond repair.
After several failed attempts to retrieve her, Roy Shoffner acquired the salvage rights in 1992, determined to make "the fork-tailed devil" airworthy again.
Built by Lockheed, she was the fastest and the most heavily armed fighter in the war.
Bob Cardin - who was there for the recovery and restoration and now is in Fresno, Calif., at Provenance Fighters, a company that buys and sells historic aircraft - says Glacier Girl is the most famous World War II plane flying today.
The recovery and restoration cost an estimated $4.5 million.
Provenance bought Glacier Girl and almost immediately sold her to Texas oilman Rod Lewis of Lewis Aeronautical in San Antonio, Texas, for an undisclosed sum.
Lewis has the money to keep her flying and to put her in air shows, Cardin said: "He bought her because he has a collection of World War II aircraft, and Glacier Girl is the crown jewel."
With Glacier Girl, Lewis Aeronautical now has nine World War II warplanes.
Cardin says Glacier Girl will return to Middlesboro a week before she departs to England on the final leg of the mission she never finished. She is scheduled to leave Middlesboro June 23 for England over the North Atlantic, Cardin says. This could be the last time people of the region get a chance to see her, other than at air shows.
He said Lewis will fly a chase plane, while Glacier Girl will be flown by Steve Hinton, one of the most experienced war bird pilots in the nation. He was a pilot and aerial coordinator for the movie "Pearl Harbor."
Cardin will be in a second chase plane.
Fulfilling the dream
Shoffner and his crews brought up Glacier Girl from beneath a 268-foot-deep coffin of blue ice, piece by piece. Shoffner once said it was like riding up and down inside a soda straw.
He brought the parts to his hangar at Middlesboro Airport, where paid workers and volunteers labored for nearly a decade to reassemble her, tooling parts to original specifications, using military technical drafts and blueprints when components could no longer be found.
In late March, the Shoffner family announced that maintenance costs, upkeep and the expense of finishing her trip to Great Britain played an instrumental role in the decision to sell Glacier Girl.
"Not long ago, it became obvious to all of us that the logistics and expense of making the trip were going to be enormous, to the point it would take sizeable additional resources," Jay Shoffner said in a press release.
"Unfortunately, raising the significant resources to make the trip involved transferring the ownership of Glacier Girl. Though this was not the family's desire, it was the only way to fully realize our father's dream and ensure the long-term support of Glacier Girl."
Jay Shoffner says that his father realized that he had "taken Glacier Girl and her legacy as far as he could."
"He had been passionate about restoring the P-38 as a testament to the World War II veterans who bore witness to her majestic silhouette and thunderous engines," Jay Shoffner says.
Glacier Girl's first 22-minute flight after restoration came Oct. 26, 2002.
The last chapter to be written is completing her flight to Europe.
In the early days, Roy Shoffner, a pilot, entertained the idea of flying her himself. That dream faded as the years of restoration passed and his health deteriorated.
Jay says his father "began to gauge the interest of prospective individuals and organizations to make ... (his vision) a reality. It was with this in mind that we decided to fulfill his dream for him."
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So what does Mr. Lewis do that allows him to do what most of us wish we could? 
