After 18 years in Wichita, the restored Boeing B-29 Superfortress named “Doc” has settled in to a permanent home in the city where the sleek, World War II-era bomber was built 75 years earlier. The B-29, powered by four Wright Cyclone R-3350-26WD air-cooled, twin-row, radial engines,is now being readied for its third season of touring airshows across the country. On March 9, the $6.5 million B-29 Doc Hangar, Education and Visitors Center at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport opened to the public, seeing an average of between 200 and 250 visitors a week, Doc’s Friends general manager and executive director Josh Wells told AIN on April 26.
Doc’s Friends is the nonprofit group that owns the airplane, which ironically spent much of its life as a bombing target at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake until a group in California led by Tony Mazzolini plucked Doc from its Mojave Desert resting place. Mazzolini later brought the airplane to the former Boeing Wichita, where over nearly two decades, a group of 300 volunteers—some of whom worked on the original B-29 production line—restored the bomber, best known as the type that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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