B-29: Frozen in Time (NOVA Classics) | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS

Video from the channel NOVA PBS Official about Boeing B-29 Superfortress, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 54:43. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A documentary from the NOVA series, first broadcast in 1996, about the attempt to recover and return to flight the Kee Bird, a Boeing B-29 that made a forced landing in 1947 in northwestern Greenland, about 250 miles north of Thule Air Base, during a secret Cold War mission. The crew came out unharmed and was rescued after three days: an Air Force aircraft located them on the second day and another landed beside them the next day. The bomber was left abandoned for almost half a century.

The video recalls that the B-29 first flew in 1942, that it could fly higher and farther than any other bomber of its time, that it served in the Pacific and over the Himalayas, and that the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nearly 4,000 were built and very few remain today. The project is led by Darryl Greenamyer, a former U-2 and SR-71 test pilot and holder of a low-altitude speed record with a Starfighter assembled from spare parts.

The team, with chief engineer Rick Kriege, uses a 1962 Caribou flown by Roger von Grote to haul from Thule a bulldozer, tires, propellers and four reconditioned 18-cylinder radial engines of over 2,000 horsepower each. The propellers measure 16 feet and weigh almost a ton. The fabric-covered control surfaces are rebuilt and several parts are made without blueprints. Bad weather and breakdowns of the Caribou delay the work; the waterlogged tundra offers only about 2,000 feet of runway, against the more than 5,000 a B-29 usually needs. With winter closing in, Kriege falls ill, is evacuated to Canada with internal bleeding, and dies two weeks later from a blood clot.

Nine months later, Greenamyer returns on a chartered Twin Otter with an expanded team, including B-29 flight engineer Thad Dulin, to take off from a frozen lake. During taxiing, the auxiliary power unit breaks loose from its mount at the rear of the fuselage; according to Greenamyer, a ruptured fuel tank sprayed it and a fire started. The crew escapes, but the fire destroys the aircraft, whose remains are left to sink into the lake once the ice melts.