Reply #22: They could salvage and restore this fighter!

[backscatter712]

Being someone raised to have an appreciation for vintage cars, vintage planes, etc., that's what I'm hoping will happen.

I remember watching a show about a group of people who originally set out to recover a B-17 that crash-landed in Greenland during WWII, along with a bunch of P-38s. The planes, over the years, were buried under hundreds of feet of ice.

When they finally were able to tunnel down through the ice and reach the aircraft, all of them were crushed like pop cans. :( The B-17 was completely destroyed - the group was able to recover a bunch of artifacts, but the dream of restoring the aircraft was impossible.

They did recover one of the P-38s. It was also crushed like a pop can, but they recovered it, rebuilt it piece by piece. There's hardly many pieces of the original plane left, since they had to rebuild so much of it, but the end result is an authentic, flying P-38 Lightning.