New York Times: In December 1942, John Pritchard and two other Coast Guard aviators were 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 (see left image) buried in a glacier there. The team set out last month with an arsenal of top-of-the-line technology: ground-penetrating radar, which can detect metallic objects close to the surface; advanced ice-melting equipment, which can pinpoint buried objects as it dissolves the ice around them; a camera that can take pictures from inside deep hollows of ice; and sensors to track the speed the glacier is moving before the plane, and bodies move out to sea.
