Doc, the B-29 Superfortress the Navy Used for Bomb Practice, and the Wichita Volunteers Who Spent Sixteen Years Bringing Her Back to the Sky

SUMMARY: How volunteers spent 16 years restoring Doc, a WWII B-29 the Navy used as a bombing target, into one of two flying Superfortresses on Earth.

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita, Kansas, in the spring of 1945 that the U.S. Navy later used as a bombing-range target for roughly 40 years in the Mojave Desert. A team of mostly retired Boeing workers known as Doc’s Friends spent about 16 years and an estimated 300,000 hours returning her to airworthy condition, and she flew again on July 17, 2016. Today she is one of only two flying B-29s in the world.

What Was the B-29 Superfortress?

The B-29 Superfortress was the most complex and expensive machine the United States built during World War II - its development reportedly cost more than the atomic bomb project. It was pressurized when almost nothing else in the air was, and it aimed its remote-controlled gun turrets through an early analog computer.

It could carry a bomb load halfway across an ocean and return home. Boeing produced the aircraft in enormous plants, and one of the largest was in Wichita, Kansas - a detail that becomes important later in this story.

Where Did the B-29 “Doc” Get Its Name?

Doc rolled out of the Wichita plant in spring 1945, just as the war was ending. She never dropped a bomb in combat and never flew a mission over Japan. Instead she went into a role few people remember: flying as a target and reference point to help train and calibrate radar operators.

The Air Force assigned a group of eight of these B-29s to the job and gave them themed nose art. In the late 1940s, someone named seven of them after the Seven Dwarfs - Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, Dopey, Sneezy, and Doc - plus one named Snow White to lead the group. That is how a WWII bomber ended up named after a cartoon dwarf.

How Did Doc End Up Abandoned in the Desert?

By the mid-1950s, the jet age had arrived and the B-29 was obsolete. The Air Force had thousands of them and no use for them. Some were scrapped, some were mothballed, and many were flown into the desert to serve as targets.

The Navy operated a bombing range at China Lake, part of the Naval Weapons Center in the California high desert. Doc and a line of other B-29s were towed onto the hardpan and staked down so crews could practice strafing and dropping practice bombs on them.

For decades she sat there - tires flat, windows gone, paint burned off, rattlesnakes in the wheel wells, and her four engines seized with sand. After roughly 40 years, she was less an airplane than a carcass. Almost anyone would have written her off.

Who Saved Doc?

Tony Mazzolini, a former B-29 crewman, refused to. He had spent years searching for a Superfortress that could actually fly again - most survivors were permanently fixed in museums - and in the 1980s he began hearing about the hulks at China Lake.

Getting permission took the better part of a decade; the Navy does not simply hand over an aircraft from an active bombing range. A deal finally came together in the late 1990s, and Doc was chosen because she was the most complete of the wrecks out there. The team recovered her in 1998.

Moving her was its own ordeal. With a wingspan of 141 feet, she had to be disassembled by hand in the desert heat - with range-safety personnel watching for unexploded ordnance - then trucked across the country in sections. Many in the warbird community quietly assumed she would only ever be a parts donor for other projects.

Why Did Doc Return to Wichita?

After bouncing around for a few years, Doc came home to Wichita, Kansas - the same city where Boeing had built her in 1945. A group of volunteers took her on, and their goal was not a static museum display. The plan was to make her fully airworthy again, certified by an FAA inspector to carry passengers.

That had been accomplished only once before. At the time there was exactly one flying B-29 on Earth - Fifi, operated by the Commemorative Air Force. Doc was going to become number two or nothing at all.

The volunteer team became known as Doc’s Friends, and many were retired Boeing engineers, sheet-metal workers, and mechanics. Some had helped build these very aircraft during the war as young people, and now, in their seventies and eighties, they returned to bend aluminum with hands that still remembered exactly how. The same city - and in some cases the same families and skills - that built her once would build her again.

What Made the Restoration So Difficult?

The hardest part of any B-29 is the engines. Doc has four Wright R-3350 engines, each with 18 cylinders in two rows. They were powerful, complicated, and infamous for overheating and catching fire - early in the war, B-29 engines killed more crews than the enemy did.

Rebuilding four of those engines to a standard you would trust with your life, six and seven decades after they were made, meant manufacturing parts from scratch. Beyond the engines came miles of wiring, fuel tanks, control cables, hydraulic lines, instruments, and glass. Every rivet was inspected, and panels too far gone had to be recreated by hand - components Boeing had not produced since the Truman administration.

Progress came in fits and starts. Funding ran out, the project stalled, and volunteers drifted away before a core group would scrape together money and start again. There were years when it looked completely dead. In total, the restoration took about 16 years and an estimated 300,000 hours of mostly volunteer labor - much of it given by people who would never fly the airplane themselves.

When Did Doc Fly Again?

Doc returned to the sky on July 17, 2016, on a summer morning in Wichita. A crowd gathered at the airport, many of them the Boeing retirees who had spent a decade and a half of their retirement in that hangar. Some who started the project did not live to see the day.

The four Wright engines - rebuilt cylinder by cylinder - lit off one at a time, coughing blue smoke before catching with a bark. Doc taxied out and lined up on the same Wichita runway she had first flown from as a new aircraft in 1945, ran up to full power, and lifted off.

She flew 71 years after she was built and 18 years after being dragged out of the desert. Witnesses say they didn’t cheer at first - they went quiet, and then they cried. The smart money had said she would never be more than spare parts, and the smart money was wrong.

Can You Still See or Fly in Doc Today?

Yes. Doc is one of only two airworthy B-29 Superfortresses in the world, and she is based in Wichita, where a dedicated hangar and education center were built around her. She tours the country and appears at airshows.

Visitors can also buy a ride in a flying B-29 - sitting where the crews sat and looking out through the greenhouse nose. Only a handful of places on Earth offer that experience.

Why Doc’s Story Matters

A warbird restoration is not really about the airplane. Doc is a chain connecting the young Boeing workers of 1945 to those same people 70 years later, teaching new volunteers how to buck a rivet - and to Tony Mazzolini, who spent years just for the right to pull a wreck out of the sand.

These aircraft aren’t saved for military need. They’re preserved because they carry something a museum case cannot hold: the sound, the smell, and the living proof of what people can do when they decide something matters. An airplane on a pole is a photograph; an airplane that flies is a heartbeat.

Key Takeaways

• Doc is a B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita in 1945 that served as a radar-calibration aircraft, not a combat bomber, and was named after a Seven Dwarfs character.
• The Navy used her as a bombing-range target at China Lake for roughly 40 years before Tony Mazzolini led her recovery in 1998.
• Volunteers known as Doc’s Friends - many retired Boeing workers - restored her over about 16 years and 300,000 hours.
• Doc flew again on July 17, 2016, 71 years after she was built.
• She is now one of only two flying B-29s in the world, based in Wichita, and the public can buy a ride aboard her.