Explorers bored a 250-foot shaft through the Greenland icecap to a B-17 bomber buried since World War II, said a sponsor who was awaiting word today of their findings. ``They're going to try to enlarge the hole to get into a hatch,'' Pat Epps, president of the Greenland Expedition Society, said Wednesday. One plan was to use hot water from the thermal borer that cut through the Arctic ice to enlarge the bottom of the shaft. If that doesn't work, ``somebody has to go down there with electric chain saws and carve around the airplane,'' Epps said. Epps, who had been on the icecap with the expedition until last week, heard by radio from Greenland on Wednesday morning that the expedition succeeded in reaching the plane. The bomber is one of two B-17s and six twin-engine, P-38 Lightning fighters that crash-landed when they ran out of fuel after being decoyed by false radio transmissions from German submarines while en route to Europe in 1942. Epps and Atlanta architect Richard Taylor formed an expedition to find and salvage the planes. This year, the third consecutive year the men flew to the icecap, a team led by Taylor used a thermal borer to drill the 42-inch diameter shaft to the B-17 named Big Stoop. A second team, led by Angelo Pizzagalli of Burlington, Vt., used a huge auger to bore a hole 16 feet in diameter toward a P-38. Epps, who hopes to fly one of the P-38s off the icecap, said plans call for getting all six fighters out by Sept. 1. The eight planes crash-landed July 15, 1942. Their crews camped in one of the B-17s for nine days until rescuers arrived on dog sleds. In the early 1970s, Col. Carl Rudder, one of the P-38 pilots, mentioned the planes to Roy Degan, a commercial airline pilot who brought the idea of an Arctic expedition to Epps. The explorers eventually obtained search and salvage rights from Denmark, which administers Greenland. In 1988, the society found the aircraft using low-frequency subsurface radar. Last year, expedition members drilled down to the B-17 and brought back poker chip-size pieces of its skin. Epps estimated his group will have spent $800,000 to $1 million by Sept. 1, financed by fund raising and Rolls Ltd., Pizzagalli's non-profit corporation in Vermont.
