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Exhuming the Glacier Girl (2009)
- anonoholic 7y agoAre there many other planes with this design of airframe? I recall seeing a plane similar to this in the air in the mid 70s (in the UK). It stuck with me as it was unlike any plane I'd seen before, or since, until recently a drone passed overhead which had a similar construction.
- nickhalfasleep 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin-boom_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin-boom_aircraft Either a de Havilland Vampire or a Cessna skymaster perhaps?
- anonoholic 7y agoOops! The "Thank you" below was meant for you. (Dodgy 3rd party mobile app, honest!) Looking again, I'm going with de Havilland Vampire as the most likely candidate.
- walrus01 7y agoIt's not an uncommon design for modern VTOL UAVs that can transition into single motor forward flight on wings. The twin boom design supports a quadcopter lift system. This is a Chinese airframe manufacturer, people add their own motors and electronics. https://www.muginuav.com/ https://www.muginuav.com/
- jcims 7y agoReminds me of the story if the Kee Bird. https://youtu.be/CE9j-W_8USw https://youtu.be/CE9j-W_8USw It’ll leave you with a knot in your stomach at the end.
- tunap 7y agoHeh, Vernon(team machinist) used to do specialty welding work for my friends & I back in the day. Was inspiring & heartbreaking to hear him tell his 1st hand account. An amazing & talented man.
- netsharc 7y agoGeez, I was wondering when the plot was going to thicken with the discovery of the dead body of a girl while searching for plane wrecks. I wish a TL;DR at the top would state that the "Girl" is what they named the plane...
- INTPenis 7y agoSame here, I only kept reading hoping to get to the part with the body.
- OJFord 7y agoYes, excluding the title, the first reference is the sixteenth paragraph. I suppose I might've guessed from the leading photo, had I not already seen comments here, but I only clicked into the comments assuming it was some centuries/millenia old body/remnants.
- Pfhreak 7y agoThe story of the landing and survival was far more interesting than the recovery. I want more details about that!
- duxup 7y agoThe P-38 still looks amazingly like a modern aircraft.
- lostlogin 7y agoIt’s well worth reading the wiki. The development issues due to the high speeds the plane could achieve and the eventual solution are interesting to read about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-38_Lightning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-38_Lightning
- rlucas 7y agoThis coverage leaves out that the expedition and recovery were financed by one of the successful sons of Middlesboro, Kentucky, who put the refurbished plane in a museum airstrip in that town as a trophy. Disclaimer: family hails from near there and Middlesboro needs all the promotion it can muster.
- WalterBright 7y agoI suspect with today's manufacturing technology and NC mills, one could be built from scratch at a doable price.
- racnid 7y agoI'm surprised it's not more common in the warbird world. It seems like on the deep restorations that's basically what they're doing. Looking a build logs it looks like huge percentages of the aircraft are built from scratch.
- WalterBright 7y agoI know. Even more problematic, complete designs don't exist for the aircraft. Often the tooling and jigs defined the design, and those are lost. The restorers who do make parts from scratch would do the rest of the community a service by preparing proper drawings for them. I know a group that decided to make an Me262 from scratch. They borrowed one from a museum in order to make the copy.
- elihu 7y ago> Today, of the 10,000 or so P-38s Lightnings which were made in the 1940s, only about six working P-38s remain. I'm often amazed at the scale of war-time manufacturing production. According to wikipedia, there were over 15,000 P-51s and over 12,000 B-17 made.
- markoman 7y agoIndeed. The U.S. Army Air Force had over 80,000 planes in its inventory at one time during WW2, and by the end of the war, had built nearly 300,000 planes. See [0] for details. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_produ...
- sneak 7y agoWhat is the purpose of this dangerous and risky salvage mission? What benefit is yielded as a result of the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent recovering and restoring this antique?