Doc, the B-29 Superfortress Pulled From a Desert Bombing Range and Rebuilt by the People Who Once Built Her

Doc is one of only two Boeing B-29 Superfortresses still flying anywhere in the world, out of nearly 4,000 originally built. After spending 40 years as a target on a California bombing range, the aircraft was recovered in 1998 and rebuilt over nearly two decades by volunteers - many of them retired Boeing workers who had built B-29s in Wichita during World War II. Doc returned to flight in July 2016.

What Is the B-29 Superfortress?

The B-29 Superfortress was the most complicated and most expensive machine the United States built during the Second World War. It cost more to develop than the atomic bomb it would eventually carry.

It was decades ahead of its time. The B-29 featured a pressurized cabin so crews could fly high without freezing or gasping for air, and remote-controlled gun turrets aimed through an early analog computer.

Power came from four Wright Duplex Cyclone engines, each with 18 cylinders arranged in two rows. They were notoriously prone to catching fire, making the aircraft a handful to build and to fly. But nothing else in the sky could carry bombs as far or as high.

Many were built in the American heartland. Boeing produced B-29s in Wichita, Kansas, where thousands rolled off the line - assembled around the clock by farm kids, housewives, and men too old to fight. That detail matters to how this story ends.

Where Did the Name “Doc” Come From?

After the war, the Air Force needed aircraft to fly ahead of radar stations so operators could practice tracking targets. One squadron named its small fleet of B-29s after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

That fleet included Snow White herself, along with Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful, Dopey, Sleepy - and Doc. Picture a 60-ton, four-engine heavy bomber with a cartoon dwarf painted on the nose. That was Doc.

How Did a B-29 End Up on a Bombing Range?

The jet age arrived quickly. By the mid-1950s, the B-29 was already obsolete, and Doc was flown out to the California desert and abandoned.

The Navy used retired aircraft as aiming points at bombing ranges such as China Lake and the Naval Air Weapons Station. Pilots would fly over, drop practice bombs, and measure how close they came to the old wreck.

So Doc sat in the Mojave Desert for 40 years - buried to her belly in blowing sand, her tail full of holes, her paint gone, and her engines seized solid. To almost anyone, she looked like scrap.

Who Rescued Doc?

Tony Mazzolini, a Navy veteran and dedicated warbird enthusiast, had spent years searching for a B-29 he could save. In the mid-1990s, he tracked Doc down on that desert range.

Recovering a 60-ton bomber the size of an apartment building from a live range was a massive undertaking - a matter of government paperwork, logistics, and sheer physical difficulty. But in 1998, the team dragged Doc free of the sand, loaded her in pieces, and pointed her toward home.

Home was Wichita, Kansas - the very city where she had been built more than 50 years earlier, on the same ground where those wartime workers had riveted her together.

Who Rebuilt Doc, and How Long Did It Take?

When Doc reached a Wichita hangar, the condition was almost hopeless: corrosion everywhere, rotted control cables, skin panels riddled with holes from the bombing range, missing wiring and instruments, and four engines reduced to seized iron. Estimates suggested roughly 100,000 parts would need to be fabricated or repaired to make her fly.

The people who took on the job were volunteers, not a factory. Many were retired Boeing workers in their 70s and 80s who had built B-29s in Wichita during the war and returned on their own time to save one last airplane. Grandfathers taught grandchildren how to buck rivets, and retired engineers bent over blueprints they had first read as young people.

They called themselves Doc’s Friends. The restoration took the better part of two decades. Funding ran out and they kept going; some volunteers passed away before Doc ever flew, and the younger people they had trained carried the work forward.

When Did Doc Fly Again?

On a July day in 2016, Doc flew.

After 40 years dead in the desert, her four Wright radials were primed, coughed to life in blue smoke, and settled into a roar. The silver bomber rolled down a Wichita runway and lifted into the air over the very city that had built her - with old Boeing hands watching their airplane fly again.

Why Doc’s Story Matters

Doc is not a static museum piece behind a velvet rope. She is a living, flying aircraft brought back by the people who loved her - and she reflects the founding spirit of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA).

Paul Poberezny founded the EAA in the 1950s for people who wanted to build, restore, and fly aircraft with their own hands. Doc’s Friends are cut from that same cloth: ordinary people who decided a piece of history was worth saving and refused to quit.

Today Doc is based in Wichita, offers ground tours, and even takes passengers up for rides in a genuine B-29 - an experience almost no living person outside a museum expected to have again. When she taxis in at a major airshow, crowds stop, point, and fall silent.

The larger lesson is one for every aspiring pilot and restorer: you don’t have to be a factory or be wealthy. Most Doc’s Friends volunteers began without knowing how to do most of what the job required. They learned it one rivet, one part, one Saturday at a time - the same patient way you learn to fly.

Key Takeaways

Doc is one of only two flying B-29 Superfortresses in the world, out of nearly 4,000 built.
The B-29 was named after a character from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs while serving as a radar-tracking target aircraft.
Doc spent 40 years as a bombing-range target in the Mojave Desert before being recovered in 1998.
Volunteers known as Doc’s Friends - many retired Boeing workers who built B-29s in Wichita - spent nearly two decades and repaired or fabricated roughly 100,000 parts to restore her.
Doc returned to flight in July 2016 and now flies nationally, offering tours and rides from her base in Wichita, Kansas.