The team now hopes to recover the newly found P-38 fighter from its icy tomb and restore the plane to flying condition. Most of that money has come from Salazar himself, who owns a machinery business in Pasadena, California.Īfter the location of the Lost Squadron was tentatively identified by a drone, a ground-based team did a survey to confirm the buried aircraft's location. The summer expeditions, each consisting of a team of about six searchers, had cost between $300,000 and $450,000 apiece, Salazar said. Salazar has led searchers to the Greenland glacier in search of the Lost Squadron planes since 2011, through a nonprofit he co-founded with colleague Ken McBride called Arctic Hot Point Solutions. "As a pilot, you can clearly understand why there were so many difficulties in that area." "It's Greenland's 'Bermuda Triangle' … the weather there shifts in a matter of minutes," Salazar said. servicemen whose planes crashed in the same area were not so fortunate. Wilson and the other airmen from the lost squadron warplanes were rescued from the ice, but other U.S. The rediscovered fighter has been identified from its crash site as P-38 "Echo", piloted by Army Air Corps Lt. Salazar said that the area was known to pilots as Piteraq Alley because of its tendency to spawn severe snowstorms that can arise in minutes - called "piteraq" in the Greenland Inuit language.Ī similar storm kept the search team in its tents on the glacier for three days during this summer’s expedition, Salazar said. aircraft flew this route during World War II as part of Operation Bolero, which delivered warplanes, pilots, equipment and supplies for the planned Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.īut after flying into a severe blizzard, the eight aircraft from the lost squadron were forced to crash-land on the surface of the glacier beside Køge Bay in southeastern Greenland. They were traveling through a chain of secret airbases in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland known as the Snowball Route. Ben Bloker/US Airforce)īoth aircraft were part of a group of two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters flying from the U.S. It was eventually restored to flying condition.
#Airplane graveyard free#
“Like a buy one get one free thing? I’ll take two.A P-38 fighter from the same Lost Squadron known as "Glacier Girl" has also been recovered from the ice. “You think they’re doing any deals on those airplanes? There’s a lot of ‘em,” someone says over his radio. They tell Keith that with over 400 planes on the ground already and another 50 to arrive soon, they don't have an exact count offhand. Keith thanks SCLA air traffic control as he departs the facility. SCLA converted tons of space into airplane valet parking. Abandoned airfields and airports around the world have been repurposed into everything from shopping malls to the Top Gear test track. George Air Force Base closed in 1992, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the acknowledged end of the Cold War.ĭuring that time, military funding rapidly constricted. There are only about a dozen commercial airplane boneyards in the U.S., and Victorville has the space for both a boneyard and the current storage overflow for the same reason: it’s the site of a retired Air Force base. Watch the Largest F-35 Elephant Walk in History.
0 kommentar(er)
