Exhuming the Glacier Girl (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Exhuming the Glacier Girl (2009)

damninteresting.com

54 pointsEndXA21 comments

> 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.

Indeed. 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_produ...

The story of the landing and survival was far more interesting than the recovery. I want more details about that!

This 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.

Geez, 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...

Same here, I only kept reading hoping to get to the part with the body.

Yes, 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.

Reminds me of the story if the Kee Bird.

https://youtu.be/CE9j-W_8USw

It’ll leave you with a knot in your stomach at the end.

Heh, 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.

Are 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin-boom_aircraft

Either a de Havilland Vampire or a Cessna skymaster perhaps?

Oops! 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.

It'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/

Thank you.

Thanks, yes, a couple of those look about right in terms of design and scale. Pretty sure it was military rather than private though.

What 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?

I suspect with today's manufacturing technology and NC mills, one could be built from scratch at a doable price.

I'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.

I 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.

The P-38 still looks amazingly like a modern aircraft.

It’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

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