See the Cold War Spy Plane Spotted by NASA 67 Years Later

Stranded on an ice sheet since 1947, a NASA mission recently spotted the B-29 Superfortress that made an emergency landing in Greenland near the beginning of the Cold War.

The image tagged May 1 by the Earth Observatory's Digital Mapping System, an instrument on NASA's P-3 Orion airplane that was conducting Operation IceBridge, shows the Kee Bird plane.

An aerial image of the Cold War spy plane Kee Bird shows it being buried in the snow. (Image source: Ice Bridge Digital Mapping System/NASA)

According to NASA, the Kee Bird was a U.S. Air Force plane that landed due to poor weather during a reconnaissance flight to the North Pole. According to Flying Magazine, the crew was mapping the area and noting any Soviet activity. The whole crew survived the ordeal, but it took three days before they were rescued.

Despite attempts in the 1990s to fix and refly the Kee Bird, the wreck remains, slowly being covered by snow.

Here is Kee Bird pictured in 2013. (Image source: Michael Studinger/NASA/GSFC)

B-29 Kee Bird before its emergency landing on Greenland. (Image source: United States Air Force via Wikimedia)

“The plane wreck lies right in between two of major science targets — Humboldt and Petermann Glaciers — and because of that, we fly almost directly over it nearly every year,” John Sonntag, a researcher from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, told NASA's Earth Observatory. “When you spend eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a blinding white ice sheet, something interesting to look at comes as a rather welcome sight.”

According to the book "Hunting Warbirds" published in 2002, all files pertaining to Kee Bird were classified. At the time of its last mission, the book reported that the plane was on commission by the Navy.

(H/T: Huffington Post)