‘Sandbar Mitchell’ B-25 Bomber Restoration Story Highlights Breakfast Honoring Veterans

Veterans will be honored Tuesday, Nov. 12, at a Fenton Rotary Club meeting where the story of the recovery of the World War II B-25 bomber “Sandbar Mitchell” will be shared.

The breakfast meeting will be held from 7:15-8:30 a.m. at Spring Meadows Country Club in Linden. It’s free for veterans; the cost for others is $10.

The guest speaker will be Patrick Mihalek, director of the the Sandbar Mitchell Organization of Brighton, the group responsible for the recovery of the B-25 bomber that crashed on the Tanana River sandbar near Fairbanks, Alaska, in June 1969.

In his own words: Watch the YouTube video in which Patrick Mihalek explains his passion for restoring the Sandbar Mitchell.

After exhausting his own resources, Mihalek, 30, has started a Kickstarter campaign to return the craft, which earned the “Sandbar Mitchell” moniker as it lay in ruins along the Tanana River, to the skies.

Mihalek obtained ownership of the Sandbar Mitchell from the family of Mitchell Edgar Thorsrud, who acquired the bomber after she was retired in 1959 and added it to a fleet of B-25s used in Alaska in the late 1960s to help fight forest fires, according to the Sandbar Mitchell restoration page on Facebook.

The plane experienced a double-engine failure shortly after takeoff on June 27, 1969, when she was called into duty to help to fight the manley Hot Springs Fire. The pilot guided the B-25 to the sandbar and walked away, but it remained there until last June with Mihalek and his friend, Todd Trainor, were able to rescue it.

Mihalek and Trainor, also of Brighton, have used parts salvaged from other B-25 bombers to rebuild the aircraft to flying status and are searching for more. If they’re successful, the bomber will fly as Sandbar Mitchell under the public trust of the non-profit Warbirds of Glory Museum.

“It has been a lifelong dream of mine since I was very young to own a B‐25 Mitchell,” Mihalek said in a YouTube video that is being used for fundraising. “There are very few B‐25 wrecks to be recovered. I cannot believe it is still there. We are very fortunate to have obtained the rights to recover Sandbar Mitchell.”

To attend the Rotary Club program, RSVP to Scott Ward at (810) 241-4848 OR sward@dtidental.com, or to Noah Morgan at (810) 287-3167.

To learn more about the presentation, go sandbarmitchell.org.