Doc the B Twenty-Nine and the Wichita Volunteers Who Pulled a Superfortress Off the Bombing Range

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that spent 50 years decaying on a California bombing range before a team of volunteers in Wichita, Kansas, recovered her and rebuilt her over roughly 16 years. She flew again in July 2016 and is today one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world. Her story is a case study in how ordinary people - many of them retirees - preserved both a historic aircraft and the vanishing skills needed to keep it alive.

What Was the B-29 Superfortress?

In its day, the B-29 was the most complex and most expensive machine the United States had ever built - development cost more than the Manhattan Project, meaning the airplane cost more to create than the atomic bomb it would eventually carry.

It was pressurized at a time when almost nothing else was. It used remote-controlled gun turrets aimed through an early analog computer, could climb above 30,000 feet, and could carry a bomb load clear across an ocean.

The airframe measured 99 feet long with a 141-foot wingspan, powered by four Wright R-3350 radial engines. Those engines were notoriously temperamental and fire-prone - the R-3350 was known to catch fire even when brand new in 1944. The crews who flew the B-29 out of Pacific bases like Tinian and Saipan in 1944 and 1945 were flying at the ragged edge of the technology of their era.

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

When World War II ended, the most advanced bomber ever built became obsolete almost overnight as the jet age arrived. Thousands of B-29s were flown to the desert, scrapped for aluminum, or - more grimly - turned into targets.

At China Lake in the California desert, the Navy needed something to test bombs and missiles against. A group of B-29s was flown into the Mojave, parked in the dirt, and left to be bombed and baked by the sun.

Doc was one of them. She was built at the Boeing plant in Wichita in 1944 and never saw combat. After the war she served as a radar calibration and training aircraft in a squadron of eight B-29s nicknamed after the Seven Dwarfs - Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, and the rest. This one was Doc.

Then she, too, was sent to the desert. She sat there for 50 years - used as a target but, by some miracle, never destroyed. The tires rotted off the wheels, the paint blew away, and the desert slowly tried to reclaim her.

Who Found Doc and Brought Her Home?

In the mid-1990s, an aircraft enthusiast named Tony Mazzolini, who had spent years searching for a restorable B-29, tracked Doc down on the range. Where most people saw hopeless corroded scrap, he saw an airplane worth saving.

Getting her off the range was its own battle. It took years of negotiation with the Navy, extensive paperwork, and considerable persistence. In the year 2000, what was left of Doc was loaded onto trucks and hauled back to Wichita - the city that built her, known as the Air Capital of the World.

How Do You Restore a 50-Year-Old Bomber?

Recovering the airplane was only the beginning. A B-29 is a four-engine heavy bomber with hundreds of thousands of parts, many of which hadn’t been manufactured in half a century. There were no spare parts on a shelf and no supply catalog. When a part couldn’t be found, the team fabricated it from scratch.

The work was done by volunteers - nobody was paid. Many were Boeing retirees who had actually built B-29s or spent decades on the line at Boeing, Cessna, and Beech. They knew how to form aluminum, buck a rivet, and read blueprints older than the younger workers standing beside them. Those younger volunteers came to learn and to be part of something.

The project stalled more than once. Funding ran dry, the economy turned, and for stretches Doc sat half-finished. Some volunteers died before the work was complete, having believed all along that she would fly again.

Rebuilding the four Wright R-3350 engines was its own challenge - getting engines that hadn’t turned in half a century to run reliably required increasingly rare expertise. In restoring the airplane, the team was also preserving the know-how itself, with old hands passing skills to a new generation before that knowledge could disappear.

When Did Doc Fly Again?

The restoration took roughly 16 years and an estimated 300,000 hours of volunteer labor.

In July 2016, at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Doc sat on the ramp with four engines that hadn’t flown since the Eisenhower administration. The crew ran up the radials one by one, and Doc lifted off - flying for the first time in decades. Veteran aircraft workers who were there watched with tears streaming down their faces.

How Many Flyable B-29s Are Left?

There are only two airworthy B-29s in the entire world. Doc is one of them. The other, based in Texas, is named FIFI - and for years FIFI was the only one flying. Both survivors come from a production run of nearly 4,000 aircraft.

Every summer, one of the places you can see Doc is EAA AirVenture at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin - the largest gathering of aircraft and aviation enthusiasts in the world, drawing about half a million people each July.

Why This Story Matters

The Experimental Aircraft Association was founded by Paul Poberezny in a Wisconsin basement in 1953, starting with a handful of people who built and flew their own airplanes. That grassroots spirit - ordinary people with tools and a passion - is the same one that pulled Doc off the bombing range.

On the warbird ramp at Oshkosh, these aircraft aren’t static museum pieces. They fly. You can stand close enough to smell the oil and hot metal, feel the ground shake when a radial fires, and watch a B-29 taxi past under her own power. Nearly all of the people who keep these warbirds flying are volunteers doing it out of love - and to pass the passion to the next generation.

Doc’s larger lesson is that nothing is ever truly too far gone - not an airplane rotting in the desert, and not the skills and stories we fear losing - as long as someone is willing to pick up a wrench and refuse to let it die.

Key Takeaways

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita in 1944 that never saw combat and later became a desert bombing-range target for 50 years.
Aircraft enthusiast Tony Mazzolini located her in the mid-1990s, and she was trucked back to Wichita in 2000.
Volunteers - many of them Boeing retirees - restored her over roughly 16 years with an estimated 300,000 hours of unpaid labor, fabricating unavailable parts from scratch.
Doc flew again in July 2016 at McConnell Air Force Base and is now one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world, alongside FIFI of Texas.
Beyond the aircraft, the project preserved rare fabrication and engine-rebuilding skills, passing them to a new generation of aviation volunteers.