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Digging a P-38 fighter plane out from under 268 feet of Greenland ice worked for one team, and now a second team, currently based in Ovid, is going to give it a try.
Ken McBride, a Californian, said the idea came to him about two years ago. He has been lining up team members and supporters every since.
What brought the team to Ovid about the middle of last week was the presence of a single-engine biplane, the Antonov AN-2, here since being acquired by Ovid resident Pete Depew a few years back.
The craft was last flown a couple of years ago. A Texas man bought the plane and has since sold it to the Greenland team. Now, McBride said, it's a matter of readying it for the journey. If all goes according to plan, the AN-2 should be at the crash scene in Greenland in three to five days, the bird nests, droppings and pesky hornets of Ovid just a memory.
Of the eight-man Greenland team, two will be aboard the AN-2 with equipment and supplies. Six others have opted to fly commercially and thus reduce the load for the AN-2. The Greenland team never gets far from the AN-2 at the Ovid Airport. In fact, the men, 45 to 63 years of age and mostly from California, get their rest in sleeping bags.
Talking about the coming P-38 restoration at his shop in California, McBride said the team could end up with a plane worth some $4.5 million to $5 million. A profit will hinge on what it ultimately costs to restore the craft. He sounded a word of warning: "The trouble with a project like this is that so much can go wrong." Weather could be a major headache.
Glacier Girl, the P-38 recovered in 1992 and restored, came with a cost of some $3 million. Crews used various equipment and streams of hot water to create a 42-inch wide tunnel and employed a thermal meltdown generator to reach the plane. The generator chews into the ice at about two feet an hour. Pieces of the P-38 were removed one at a time. Glacier Girl, airborne once again, sold for $7 million.
http://www.theithacajournal.com/article ... enland+ice
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