Race against time to find US air heroes' icy Greenland grave

IT WAS December 1942 and the height of the Second World War when she received news of her brother. "Nancy," her mother said calmly over the phone. "John's been lost."

"When I heard those words, my heart just sank," said Nancy Pritchard Morgan, 87, of Annapolis, Maryland. Two weeks earlier, on 29 November, her brother and two other Coast Guard aviators had been listed as missing after their plane lost radio contact - and presumably crashed - during a storm off the southeast coast of Greenland.

Now, 68 years later, the Coast Guard has commissioned a private recovery team to try to locate, excavate and repatriate the three men entombed in a J2F-4 Grumman Duck biplane in a glacier.

The team set out last month with an arsenal of top-of-the-line technology: ground-penetrating radar, which can detect metal objects close to the surface; advanced ice-melting equipment, which can pinpoint buried objects as it dissolves ice around them; and a camera that can take pictures inside deep glacial fissures.

The team also installed two GPS devices that will track glacial movement. The goal is to find the servicemen before their close relatives are all dead and the ice where they are buried moves out to sea.

"Any branch of service wants to recover their fallen members, if they can," said John Long, a Coast Guard master chief petty officer and head of the "Duck Hunt" mission. "It's the right thing to do," he said.

The 15-member team had expected to spend no more than five days investigating six sites identified as promising. But relentless rain, harsh winds and low visibility kept helicopters grounded, leaving the team stuck on the ice and unable to explore all the sites. Eleven days passed before everyone was able to return to the airport in Kulusuk.

The recovery effort began three years ago, when Chief Long began piecing together historic clues. The original 1943 accident report included a hand-drawn map from Colonel Bernt Balchen, the American polar aviator who ran a training base in Greenland during the war. Chief Long determined the crash had taken place within a three-square-mile area about 2,300ft above Koge Bay.

In 2008, Long ordered an aerial survey using Essex ground-penetrating radar, which transmitted electromagnetic waves from a P-3 Orion airplane flying 3,500ft above the glacier. A large metal object like the Grumman Duck - which would be a valuable artifact to recover, since only 32 were made - would show up as a white blotch. Of the blotches on the Essex map, three coincided with the co-ordinates on Balchen's chart, and one had the shape of a biplane.

To move the project forward, the Coast Guard hired a private contractor, Luciano Sapienza, chief executive of North South Polar Recoveries of Jersey City. In 1992, he was part of the expedition that recovered the "Glacier Girl", a P-38 Lightning airplane downed over Greenland in 1942. He and his team set out for Koge Bay late last month.

Kate McKinley, 34, a geophysicist, was in charge of the hand-held ground-penetrating radar kit. The radar detects anything metallic, as well as bedrock and crevasses, within the first few hundred feet. The readout shows a cross-section of the ground on a black-and-white screen with hyperbola-shaped anomalies. When McKinley found an anomaly that looked promising, she marked the spot for drilling. Altogether, she was able to mark ten spots before the rain made the ice too slushy.

Weegee Smith, 57, a specialist in building custom field instruments, moved in next, operating a powerful ice-melter. The contraption siphoned water from a well Smith had dug and heated it to 180 degrees and Smith sprayed the hot water on the target area, digging a shaft 130ft deep.

Unfortunately, "the ice melted with no resistance the whole way down," Smith said. Resistance, he said, would have indicated "that we hit something and it was time to take a look."

On the third day of drilling, he did feel some resistance, so it was time to bring in the subsurface camera. Designed by Alberto Behar, 42, an electrical engineer at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the camera has a fish-eye lens surrounded by 27 LEDs that could illuminate the shaft Smith had made and transmit real-time images. Any indication of the J2F-4's metal, oil or paint chips would prompt Smith to drill more holes.

While all this was going on, two other teams set out to find the other candidate sites on the glacier, carefully navigating sinkholes, snow bridges and 8ft-wide crevasses. They marked the secondary locations and installed two permanent GPS units, which track the movement and speed of the glacier.

After four days of drilling in freezing rain and wind, the scientists saw no indication at the primary site that the anomalies detected by radar were anything but large crevasses. Effectively, the team was able to rule out this location and focus on other sites.

But time is running out for the Coast Guard, which has already spent $579,000 (366,000) on the Duck Hunt, including $314,000 (198,000) for the recent trip. With warmer temperatures, scientists say, the glacier and plane are advancing more quickly toward the ocean than previously estimated.

"This has been the warmest summer Greenland has seen in 150 years," McKinley said.

"We are disappointed we couldn't do more," Sapienza said, "but we learned a great deal and the Coast Guard is on track for the next steps. These men made the ultimate sacrifice, and it's our duty to bring them home."

Morgan took the news in stride as the team headed home. She has fond memories of her older brother, who introduced her to the man who became her husband. "It's wonderful to know John hasn't been forgotten," she said. "We can't give up, not yet."