After decommissioning, B-29s were used as target practice in the desert.
All were thought to be wrecks and swiss cheese.
But someone found one out there that was restorable, a weird long shot.
Here’s the story of the man who needed to bring DOC back to life.
HT/ hd
Neat!
That has always been a beautiful aircraft.
What a great story. Thanks BFH.
Exquisite!! A remarkable story!
I love stuff like this!
Thanks!
Seeing that plane take to the air made me tingle all over. What a wonderful thing to live in a world with such magnificent crazy people with the means to take on such a project and inspire so many to join in. Absolutely terrific!
The development of the B29 cost more than the Manhattan Project.
@Tony R – That is very difficult to believe given the costs of Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos, and the tens of thousands of people working on the bomb. Would you be so kind as to supply a source for that statement?
That title scared the shit out of me!
Hey Brad, isn’t that what your dad flew. Those guys were heroes in every sense of the word.
Another great story from the old guy, HD.
Amazing. All of it. All of them.
Such a simple pleasure. Wonderful.
(My aunt was too young to work on the B29, but did work on the B52 and then, much later, the Stealth. She retired after a life-long career at Boeing.)
Uncle Al, the B-29 project cost over $3 billion and the Manhattan Project cost $2 billion. That’s because of the 4000 B-29s produced, each the cost of a dozen P-51s.
Thanks, Maj. Mal and Tony R. I was not aware of the scope of the work needed to get those B-29s into service.
One way to look at it, though, is that since delivering Little Boy and Fat Man to Hiroshima and Nagasaki required B-29s and nothing else would do, A-bombing Japan cost $5 billion!
@ Uncle Al, there is a great one hour documentary on Youtube about the developement of the b29. I explains how the new engines overheated, the development of pressurized etc . You get the point.
I was fortunate enough to meet Brigadier General Tibbets in the 90’s before his death. He rode our submarine for a day and had lunch with us. A
true blue goddamn American hero. May he rest in piece.
Thank Almighty God that this incredible aircraft dropped the two atom bombs on Japan to end World War II. It saved 1-2 million Allied casualties and possibly as many at 25-million Japanese casualties. It also spared us a divided post-war Japan, with the Soviets getting their share.
My father had just come through Okinawa and instead of going home, they went into a new camp on Okinawa, ready for the build-up to Operation Downfall, the actual invasion of Japan.
Yep, that old B29 might’ve saved my life….
Thanks, O.F.T. Amazing how few realize that the bombing saved not only Allied lives, but many more Japanese lives. The invasion would have begun with a blockade, starving millions. What a horrible thing that would have been. And then the fighting would have been brutal.
As you say, thank God.
now drop the load on the OSCARS!
The B-29 was part of the Manhattan Project. Scientists didn’t know if the bomb would work. But they knew if it did, that no existing plane (in 1942) could carry it.
Beautiful video, thanks.
Wow! Great story.
I once lived in China Lake and father-in-law, wife and I got special clearance to go to the boneyard. Crawled all over B29s, B17s etc. what a great day that was. Dad was a B17 pilot and instructor in Europe during WWII and he was like a little kid that day, back in 1976.
@Kafir: “The B-29 was part of the Manhattan Project.”
Well it ended up that way, but the B-29 development started earlier as a way to deliver bombs to Germany if England fell.
Wikipedia is pretty accurate, at least about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress