the ice queen rises

Legendary WWII warplane unearthed from 268 feet of ice lands at Houston museum

In 1992, a crack American expedition team undertook the mammoth mission of recovering the war planes of the Lost Squadron, a group of WWII fighter planes buried beneath 268 feet of ice in Greenland.

That team led by Bob Cardin, Patt Epps, and Richard Taylor, discovered the Glacier Girl, a WWII P-38 plane that crashed during attempted landings some 50 years before in 1942. After a harrowing rescue operation the Glacier Girl was unearthed from its icy grave, the sole, rescued survivor of the squadron of P-38s and B-17 warplanes that attempted to cross over Greenland.

Now, just as Houston recovers from its own ice days, locals can get up close to the iconic Glacier Girl at the Lone Star Flight Museum (11551 Aerospace Ave. at Ellington Field). The restored aircraft will be on view at the museum through Sunday, February 18.

As those who’ve visited know, the museum’s hangar and exhibit halls are home to myriad, magnificent aircraft showcasing decades of American flight. While WWII aircraft are nothing new at the aviation museum, the Glacier Girl is unique for its dramatic recovery story.

A cinematic saga, Glacier Girl’s rescue was a precarious effort that seemed made for TV — and was eventually chronicled on a History Channel Mega Movers episode titled “Extreme Aircraft Recovery.” The heroic salvaging saw Cardin and the team fashion what they dubbed a “Super Gopher” device that circulated heated water through a metal cone to melt holes 27 stories deep.

Once the Gopher reached the plane, the team began the dangerous, painstaking process of recovering the plane by pieces. Workers were slowly lowered down shafts measuring only 4 feet wide; each drop took 20 minutes.

Glacier Girl Lone Star Flight Museum The Glacier Girl is considered the finest flight-ready warbird restoration. Photo courtesy of Lone Star Flight Museum

The intrepid team rescued all the essential pieces, including the 3-ton, 17-foot-long fuselage. After a 10-year restoration, the Glacier Girl now boasts the only working P-38 machine guns in existence, and is considered by many to be the finest, flight-ready warbird restoration.

Photo courtesy of Lone Star Flight Museum

The iconic Glacier Girl has parked at the Lone Star Flight Museum.

A soaring tribute to the Greatest Generation and American ingenuity, indeed.

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The Glacier Girl is on view through Sunday, February 18 at Lone Star Flight Museum, 11551 Aerospace Ave. at Ellington Field. For tickets, hours, and more information, visit the official museum site.

Movie Review

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya face pre-marriage jitters in The Drama

Photo courtesy of A24

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.

Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.

A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.

Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.

Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.

Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.

The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not given completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.

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The Drama opens in theaters on April 3.

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