Time flies: Classic moments in aviation at labs and sites that work on NNSA missions

1942: Bad weather forced six P-38 fighters and two B-17 bombers to crash land in Greenland. While the crews were saved, the planes were left behind in the arctic ice cap. Shown here is Glacier Girl, one of the P-38s, which was recovered with Y-12 precision manufacturing technology and restored in 2002.

1954: Around 30 million pine seedlings are planted at Savannah River Plant. A plane dusted the fields in attempts to stop grub worms from destroying their roots.

1957: A prototype US Navy blimp readies for flight at the Nevada Test Site.

1965: Lady Yucca, a heavily-damaged B-17, was restored at the Nevada Test Site and taken out of retirement to fight forest fires across the country for another 20 years. Today, Lady Yucca is one of the few airworthy B-17’s in the world and regularly stuns airshow spectators as the historic Nine-0-Nine. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xu9maSCMhk)

1965: Lady Yucca, a heavily-damaged B-17, was restored at the Nevada Test Site and taken out of retirement to fight forest fires across the country for another 20 years. Today, Lady Yucca is one of the few airworthy B-17’s in the world and regularly stuns airshow spectators as the historic Nine-0-Nine. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xu9maSCMhk)

1979: Pollutant sampling and analysis is conducted with the help of specialized equipment aboard a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory DC-3 aircraft, shown here on the right. The effort was part of a two-year atmospheric study used to develop regional air pollution models and determine environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels.

1994: Sandia researchers Dennis Roach and Ken Harman examine the inside of a Boeing 707 for long-term structural fatigue at Sandia’s Aging Aircraft Nondestructive Inspection (NDI) Validation Center, operated for the Federal Aviation Administration. NDI techniques allow inspectors to assess the integrity of aircraft structures without requiring disassembly.

2024: The NNSA Aerial Measuring System’s Leonardo AW139 helicopter provides specialized airborne radiation detection systems for measuring contamination.