Doc, the B-29 Superfortress That Sat in the Mojave as a Missile Target for Forty Years, and the Wichita Volunteers Who Spent Sixteen Years Bringing Her Back to the Sky

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that spent roughly 40 years as a gunnery target in California’s Mojave Desert before a flight engineer named Tony Mazzolini and thousands of Wichita volunteers brought her back to flying condition. After 16 years of restoration and more than 300,000 hours of volunteer labor, Doc flew again on July 17, 2016. She is one of only two airworthy B-29s left in the world, alongside the Commemorative Air Force’s Fifi.

What Was the B-29 Superfortress?

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most complex, most expensive, and most advanced aircraft of the Second World War. Its development program actually cost more than the atomic bomb it would eventually carry.

It was a genuine giant for its era. It had a 99-foot wingspan and a pressurized cabin - a rarity at the time - that let crews fly warm and comfortable at 30,000 feet without freezing in oxygen masks. Its gun turrets were remote-controlled and aimed by an analog computer built from gears and selsyn motors.

Power came from four Wright R-3350 engines: 18 cylinders in two rows, producing 2,200 horsepower each. They were notoriously temperamental and prone to catching fire - a hazard that killed more B-29 crews in training than enemy action did in combat.

The Story of Doc: From Wichita Factory to Desert Target

Boeing built B-29s by the thousands during 1944 and 1945 at a plant in Wichita, Kansas. The specific aircraft known as Doc rolled off that factory floor in March 1945 - too late for combat. She trained crews and did quiet support work instead.

Doc was one of a squadron of eight aircraft named after the characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Snow White herself. Doc, the flight leader, gave the group its identity.

She continued into the 1950s doing radar calibration and odd jobs. Then, in 1956, the Air Force declared her surplus. The jet age had arrived, and no one wanted a piston-engine bomber.

The Air Force flew her to China Lake, the Navy’s weapons range in the Mojave Desert, and parked her in the sand.

Why Did the Military Use B-29s as Missile Targets?

The military didn’t simply store these aircraft - they used them. Rows of surplus B-29s were lined up on the desert hardpan as live gunnery and rocket targets for fighter and attack pilots practicing their gun runs. Some were painted with a bright aiming point so pilots couldn’t miss.

For 40 years, Doc sat exposed. The paint burned off, the rubber rotted, and desert grit worked into every crack. Rattlesnakes moved into the wheel wells and birds nested in the engines while the aluminum went chalky and white.

Remarkably, the gunners mostly missed her. While some of her sisters were shredded by cannon fire, Doc simply faded in the sun - a forgotten ghost of the most sophisticated aircraft of her generation.

Who Found Doc and Rescued Her?

The man behind the rescue was Tony Mazzolini, himself a former B-29 flight engineer. His goal was audacious: to save a B-29 that could actually fly, not just sit behind a museum rope.

At the time, that was nearly impossible. Out of nearly 4,000 B-29s built, exactly one remained airworthy - the Commemorative Air Force’s Fifi. Everything else had been scrapped, placed in museums, or left dead in the desert.

Mazzolini located the row of hulks at China Lake in 1987 and found Doc. He then spent years navigating paperwork, negotiating with the Navy and Air Force to convince the U.S. government to release a target aircraft from an active weapons range.

It took until 1998 to free her and truck her, in pieces, back to Wichita - roughly 13 years from dream to delivery. She returned to the same city, near the same factory floor, where she had been built 53 years earlier.

How Do You Restore a B-29 From a Corroded Hulk?

What arrived in Wichita was not a tired airplane but a corpse. Corrosion had eaten through the airframe in a thousand places. Control cables, hydraulic lines, and miles of wiring were rotten or gone. The engines were seized, the Plexiglas was crazed and shattered, and there was rocket and bullet damage in the tail. Whole sections of skin had to be cut out and rebuilt.

A B-29 is far harder to restore than a fighter because it is enormous, deeply complex, and no one had manufactured its parts in half a century. You couldn’t order a gasket or call up for a bracket.

Instead, for the thousands of parts the aircraft needed, someone had to locate the original 1940s Boeing drawings, decode them, and fabricate each part by hand to aircraft standard - so that the FAA would eventually certify the aircraft as airworthy to carry passengers.

Who Actually Did the Work?

Volunteers are the heart of this story. Many were retired Boeing engineers and mechanics - the very people who had built aircraft on the Wichita line and knew the B-29 intimately. They were joined by young apprentices, airline mechanics giving up their Saturdays, and men in their 70s and 80s crawling through the fuselage on their hands and knees.

They worked for free. Over the years, the team poured more than 300,000 hours of volunteer labor into the aircraft - people showing up week after week, year after year, purely for the love of it.

It was never easy. Funding ran out more than once, and the project nearly died on the hangar floor several times. Some volunteers passed away before they ever saw her fly. But they refused to quit.

When Did Doc Fly Again?

On July 17, 2016, on a runway in Wichita, Kansas, the crew fired up all four Wright R-3350s, ran her down the pavement, and Doc lifted off.

The sound of those engines is unmistakable. A radial doesn’t merely start - it coughs, belches blue oil smoke, and shudders as 18 cylinders sort themselves into a deep, loping rumble. Doc carries four of them: roughly 7,200 cubic inches per side and nearly 9,000 horsepower when all four are running together. It was a sound no one had heard from her in some 60 years.

By that first flight, the numbers told the whole arc: nearly 70 years since she was born, 40 of them spent as a desert target, and 16 years of restoration to undo the damage.

Why This Matters for Pilots and Aviation Heritage

There are only two flying B-29s in the entire world - Fifi and Doc - out of nearly 4,000 built. The reason there are two instead of one is that one flight engineer wouldn’t let go of a dream and an entire city backed him up.

Heritage does not preserve itself. Every flying warbird represents people who chose to spend their weekends inside a corroded fuselage rather than on a golf course. Each surviving example is a monument to that stubbornness.

Today Doc flies the airshow circuit and, importantly, offers rides - letting ordinary people feel the sound, smell, and shake of a B-29 rather than knowing it only from old newsreels. A museum and education center now stands around her in Wichita, completing the circle: born in Wichita, dead in the desert, resurrected in Wichita, and now teaching the next generation there.

The organization that keeps her flying is Doc’s Friends, working alongside Boeing’s historical records and the Commemorative Air Force, which kept the flame lit with Fifi through the lean years.

Key Takeaways

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita in March 1945, declared surplus in 1956, and used as a desert gunnery target for about 40 years.
Former B-29 flight engineer Tony Mazzolini found her at China Lake in 1987 and got her freed and trucked to Wichita by 1998.
Restoration took 16 years and more than 300,000 hours of volunteer labor, much of it from retired Boeing workers.
Doc’s first restored flight was July 17, 2016, in Wichita.
She is one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world, alongside Fifi, and now flies the airshow circuit while offering rides to the public.