Doc, the B-29 Superfortress That Sat Twenty Years as a Desert Bombing Target Before Three Hundred Thousand Volunteer Hours Brought Her Back to the Sky

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that spent roughly two decades as a bombing target on a U.S. Navy weapons range in the Mojave Desert before a team of volunteers restored her to flying condition. After more than 300,000 volunteer hours spread across about 16 years, she flew again in July 2016. Today she is one of only two airworthy B-29s left in the world.

What was the B-29 Superfortress?

In the early 1940s, the B-29 was the most complicated, most expensive, and most ambitious machine the United States had ever built - more expensive than the Manhattan Project. It was pressurized, so crews could fly high without freezing or breathing bottled oxygen the entire way.

It carried remote-controlled gun turrets aimed through an early analog computer, and it was powered by four Wright Duplex Cyclone engines - each an 18-cylinder radial producing more than 2,000 horsepower. In those early days, those engines had a dangerous habit of catching fire.

Boeing built thousands of them in Wichita, Kansas, during the war. Doc rolled off that Wichita line in 1944, but she never flew combat. Her real story began afterward.

Why was Doc named after a dwarf?

After World War II, the Navy converted a batch of B-29s into radar calibration aircraft - large, metallic flying targets that new radar systems and their crews could practice against.

Someone with a sense of humor named that squadron after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There was a Snow White, a Happy, a Sleepy, a Bashful, a Grumpy, a Dopey, a Sneezy - and a Doc, named for the dwarf with the glasses who could never quite get his words out. Each aircraft wore its cartoon dwarf on the nose.

How did Doc end up as a bombing target?

When jets arrived, the propeller bombers became old, slow, and expensive, and they were flown out to the desert to be parked. Doc ended up at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, in the high desert.

At China Lake, an old airplane in the open isn’t a museum piece - it’s a target. The Navy towed these hulks onto the range to sight in weapons systems. Doc sat there for about two decades. The paint burned off, the rubber rotted, birds nested in her, and the weapons range did what a weapons range does.

Who found Doc and rescued her?

In the mid-1990s, a former B-29 crewman named Tony Mazzolini set out to find a Superfortress worth saving. He had heard there were still carcasses at China Lake, so he walked the range and found a scattered graveyard of B-29s - most of them blown apart.

Then he found one that was mostly intact. It was Doc.

Getting her out was a battle of its own. You cannot simply drive onto an active Navy weapons range and haul away a 50-year-old bomber. It took years of paperwork and permissions, plus real goodwill from the Navy, which ultimately wanted to see her saved. Between 1998 and 2000, crews disassembled her in the sand, loaded her onto trucks, and hauled her back to Wichita - the same city where she was born.

Who restored Doc, and how long did it take?

When Doc came home, the people who showed up to rebuild her weren’t a corporation. They were volunteers, and many were the very people - or the children and neighbors of the people - who had built B-29s in Wichita during the war. Retired Boeing engineers, sheet metal workers, and riveters in their 70s and 80s returned to an airplane they had assembled the first time.

They called themselves Doc’s Friends. There is no parts store for a B-29, so when a part didn’t exist, they made it. They fabricated skins, rebuilt systems from wartime drawings, and got four Wright engines running again - engines that were temperamental even when brand new.

By the time they finished, the volunteers had poured more than 300,000 hours into the airplane over about 16 years. Some who started the project did not live to see it finished. They knew that when they picked up their tools, and they did the work anyway.

When did Doc fly again?

In July 2016 - 16 years after she came off the trucks and more than 70 years after she left the factory - Doc sat on the Wichita ramp restored to gleaming bare aluminum, her name freshly painted on the nose.

The first flight of a rebuilt airplane is the most dangerous flight it will ever make. Four engines that had spent decades in a desert were asked to lift more than 60 tons of history off a Kansas runway. The Cyclones lit off one at a time, roughly 8,000 horsepower of radial engine coming alive - a sound the sky over Wichita hadn’t heard from this airplane since Harry Truman was in the White House.

She rolled, she lifted, and Doc flew. People who had spent 16 years bent over that airplane stood on the ramp and wept, because the faith had paid off.

How many flying B-29s are left today?

Doc is one of only two airworthy B-29 Superfortresses left in the entire world. The other is Fifi, kept flying in Texas. That’s two out of nearly 4,000 ever built.

Doc now lives in her own hangar in Wichita and tours during the flying season, letting visitors walk through her, sit inside, and hear those engines run. Some of her skin was shaped by men in their 80s who first built the same airplane as teenagers and came back one more time to do it right.

Key Takeaways

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, built in Wichita in 1944, that served postwar as a Navy radar calibration aircraft named after the Snow White dwarf.
She spent about two decades as a bombing target at China Lake, California, before Tony Mazzolini located her in the mid-1990s.
Volunteers known as Doc’s Friends invested more than 300,000 hours over roughly 16 years to restore her.
Doc returned to flight in July 2016 and is one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world, alongside Fifi in Texas - out of nearly 4,000 built.
A warbird restoration is less about metal than about a promise passed from one generation to the next.