Some of those aircraft are still officially listed as missing. But a whole plane frozen inside a drifting iceberg—that was something else entirely. The obvious question was how an aircraft could end up inside a mass of ice at all: crash into a glacier, become trapped, and remain there for decades.
As unlikely as it sounds, history offers a few examples. In 1942, an entire group of American aircraft was lost in Greenland—the so-called “Lost Squadron.” They were eventually found nearly fifty years later under about 260 feet of ice.
But this case had one detail that immediately bothered the specialists who arrived on scene. The plane was not buried deep. It sat in the upper layers of the iceberg. That meant either the surrounding ice had melted significantly in recent years, or the aircraft had been trapped there relatively recently.
Either possibility raised a fresh set of questions, and at that point the research team had no solid answers. The divers began preparing for a difficult operation the following morning.
That was when one of them, studying the aircraft through the ice from the side of the boat, noticed something important and reported it at once to the operation leader. It was a detail that fit none of the working theories being discussed on board. A heavy hatch in the fuselage was open from the inside.
It had not been blown out by impact or torn loose in the crash. It looked as though it had been opened the way a person opens a hatch when trying to get out. The hinges were still clearly visible and well preserved in the ice.
The locking mechanism, judging from the exposed fragments, appeared to have been functional when the plane was trapped. And that meant only one thing. Someone had been alive inside that aircraft after it came down, and at some point that person had opened the hatch.
The operation leader, an experienced Norwegian naval officer named Knut Bergman, ordered all open-channel radio traffic stopped immediately. From that point on, communications would go through a secure encrypted line. The divers received a full briefing and went under.
The first reconnaissance dive lasted just under forty minutes. When the divers climbed back aboard, they were quiet for a long moment. One of them, a veteran with twenty years of Arctic experience, pulled off his mask and said simply that there was something else down there that needed to be seen.
Images taken with underwater equipment were sent straight to the main monitor. The fuselage was badly damaged in the nose section, likely from a hard impact with ice. But the tail section of the bomber had remained largely intact.
On the tail, beneath a layer of ice that had partially melted in recent weeks, the original markings could still be made out. Factory letters and numbers formed a unique identification code. Bergman sent the code to central command at once…
