Air Force Museum
'My Gal Sal'
On June 27, 1942, the pilot of a B-17E named "My Gal Sal" was forced to make a belly-landing on the Greenland icecap during a flight from the United States to England. He made an excellent landing with the only damage to the plane being bent propeller blades.
In depth
History & service
Once the downed plane had been located, Col. Bernt Balchen set out for its location in a PBY amphibian and landed on a lake about 25 miles away. He and Sgt. Healy then began walking to the B-17 across treacherous crevasses, snow bridges, drifts and ice-cold rivers and pits of slush. It took them hours to reach the airplane and its 13 crew members. After a night of rest, Col. Balchen and his companion led the 13 survivors slowly and carefully back to the lake where they boarded the Catalina and took off for Bluie West 8. The rescued men had been marooned for 10 days.
With USAF cooperation, the Society of Automotive Engineers sent a representative to the isolated site by helicopter in 1965 to gather samples of hydraulic fluid, rubber, canvas and Plexiglass materials, and navigational, hydraulic and aircrew equipment items. These items were desired for laboratory evaluation as to the long-term effects from the cold, wet environment of the Arctic. Many significant facts were learned from the evaluation, facts that could be applied to such military programs as the Titan and Minuteman ballistic missiles being maintained in an operational-readiness status in underground silos.
Aircraft change the battlefield
In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.
The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.
Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.
