AllMovie

The case made international headlines and stirred the imagination of millions. On July 15, 1942, a squadron of eight planes en route to Iceland - six P-38 fighters and two B-17 bombers - accidentally became lost in a blizzard and crash landed in icy Greenland. The crew members made it to safety, but the crafts remained abandoned for decades (their exact geographic location unknown) and historians began referring to them as the "lost squadron." This all changed in 1981, when a couple of ambitious explorers from Atlanta, Georgia determined to find the squadron once and for all. Simply locating the crafts took a whopping eight years, and that only marked the beginning of the effort: the planes themselves were encased in ice, 250 beneath the surface level of a glacier. Thus began a years-long struggle to get the planes out - a struggle that presented tremendous obstacles even above and beyond the initial excavation. The explorers nevertheless succeeded at both rescuing the planes and restoring them. This documentary from the History Channel cable network presents the story as it occurred, from the initial 1942 accident through the day when the P-38 Glacier Girl aircraft took flight once again from a Kentucky runaway.