This squadron, so the story ran, was on a World War II mission when it ditched in Greenland in 1942. The crews had been rescued, but their brand-new warplanes were left on the ice cap. Someone said they had been seen as recently as the early 60s.
"I swear, that's a beautiful airplane," Epps said.
"Yeah," the customer replied, "but I've always wanted a P-38."
Epps chuckled. "Well, sir, I know where six P-38s are."
Epps called Taylor that evening. "Hey, Richard, want to go north again?"
Epps and Taylor peered down. The landscape was a gently
rolling, featureless blanket of whiteness. They had heard reports
that the planes had been seen from the air as recently as 1961. A B-
17 tail fin was 20 feet high, so there was every reason to believe
the tip might be visible poking through a mound of snow. But they
saw nothing.
To help them find the planes, Epps and Taylor had rented a pair of magnetometers, devices that can detect iron and steel by the variations they cause in the earth's magnetic field. For practice they had walked around DeKalb-Peachtree Airport locating pipes under its concrete apron. The magnetometers had worked like a charm. On the ice cap, Epps and Taylor set up a simple grid pattern and took turns walking in parallel lines about 50 yards apart. They took readings at regular intervals and watched for large fluctuations that might indicate the location of a plane.
The next day they retraced part of the grid and got wildly different results.
To try to solve the puzzle of their erratic magnetometer readings, Epps and Taylor visited the Experiment Station at the Georgia Institute of Technology, their alma mater. They were told that the fluctuations in their readings were probably caused by the generally intense magnetic activity common at high latitudes. Subsurface radar would probably be more effective.
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| Photo by Susan Epps Ward |
Toward the end of the second week, with no sign of the planes, the airport at Kulusuk scheduled to close for the weekend Taylor and Epps reached one of the unspoken decisions that characterized their management style.
"Time's up, right?" Taylor said to Epps.
"Yup," Epps replied. Reluctantly, they shut the expedition down.
At 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 2, [Bil] Thuma was operating the probe when he made contact with something at 250 feet.
Epps, Taylor and [Norman] Vaughan spent time comparing notes and studying the 1942 photographs. They identified each plane, including the one they'd hit with the probe, and using their Global Positioning System [equipment], fixed the latitude and longitude of their positions.
Taylor held up a portable tape recorder and announced that Bobbie Bailey had given him a tape to play when a piece of the plane was removed. He punched play and Diana Ross sang The Impossible Dream.
[Don] Brooks' thermal meltdown generator, which resembled a torpedo with a giant stainless-steel nose cone, was suspended by chains over the B-17s location. Water from the solar collector fed into the generator-powered boiler, and hot water was pumped into the meltdown device. By keeping the hot nose cone just above the ice, it would, in theory, melt straight down as it was lowered.
Gil Lund was on the night shift when the Gopher veered off-course at 70 feet.
One hundred yards away, the Super Gopher was melting a four-foot diameter hole down through the ice cap. It resembled an obese plumb bob around which copper tubing had been wound. Boiling water was pumped through the tubing and back to the surface.
At 9 a.m. on June 6, the Super Gopher hit something at 256 feet.
For Epps, searching for the Lost Squadron had never been a business venture. It had started as a romantic adventure, a chance for him and Taylor to become explorers and leave civilization behind. The challenge was in seducing the ice cap to give up its treasure. That done, the adventure came to an end.
"Anything else is just economics. If a man wants one of those P-38s, we've proved it can be done."