Doc, the B Twenty-Nine Superfortress Found Rusting in the Mojave as a Bombing Target and Flown Home to Wichita by the Same Town That Built Her

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that sat as a bombing target in California’s Mojave Desert for more than 40 years before volunteers in Wichita, Kansas - the city that built her - restored her to flight. She flew again in July 2016 and is today one of only two airworthy B-29s left in the world, alongside the Commemorative Air Force’s Fifi. Her story is less about metal and rivets than about a town refusing to let one of its own disappear into the sand.

What Is Doc the B-29?

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, one of the most complex and expensive aircraft of the Second World War. She rolled out of the Boeing plant in Wichita in the spring of 1945, built by a workforce made up largely of women - the mothers, daughters, and wives of Wichita - while the men were overseas.

The B-29 was a technological leap. She was pressurized, letting her crew fly at high altitude in shirtsleeves while outside temperatures were brutally cold. She carried remote-controlled gun turrets aimed through an early analog computer, and four Wright engines, each producing more than 2,000 horsepower and each notorious for running hot enough to catch fire. Famously, the B-29 program cost more to develop than the atomic bomb the aircraft would later carry.

Why Is the Plane Named Doc?

Doc was completed too late to see combat and never dropped a bomb in anger. Instead, the Air Force assigned her to radar calibration duty - flying as a target so radar operators on the ground could learn to distinguish a real threat from a false return.

A group of eight of these radar aircraft was named after the characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Snow White herself, plus Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey - and Doc. Someone stenciled the bespectacled cartoon dwarf on her nose, and the name stayed with her for the rest of her life.

How Did Doc End Up as a Bombing Target?

By the 1950s, jets were arriving and piston-engine bombers were obsolete. The Air Force flew Doc to the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake in the Mojave Desert and parked her.

There she became target practice. Pilots on training runs put gunfire and bomb craters into the rows of parked aircraft. Doc sat in the desert for roughly 42 years - tires flat and cracked, aluminum dulled by desert varnish, birds nesting in the engine cowlings, sand filling the wheel wells. Most people saw fifteen tons of scrap.

Who Rescued Doc from the Desert?

One man saw an airplane: Tony Mazzolini. He knew that of the nearly 4,000 Superfortresses ever built, almost none survived - at the time, exactly one was flying anywhere in the world, Fifi, kept alive by the Commemorative Air Force.

Mazzolini located Doc at China Lake in the mid-1980s, half-buried and shot up, but with good bones. Recovering an aircraft from an active Navy weapons range took years of paperwork and repeated rejections before he finally secured her in the late 1990s. Crews had to jack her up and coax the landing gear back to life just to drag her out of the sand.

How Was Doc Restored to Flying Condition?

The team faced a defining question: preserve Doc as a static museum piece, or make her fly again. They chose flight - and they brought her home to Wichita, setting up a restoration shop in the very city where the B-29 was born.

The volunteers were remarkable. Some were the original wartime workers, now in their seventies and eighties, who had riveted these aircraft as young people and returned to guide a new generation. Younger engineers, mechanics, and retirees joined them.

The work was punishing. The Wright engines were the hardest part - parts no longer existed, so the team hunted, hoarded, rebuilt, and sometimes manufactured components from original drawings. Every fuel line, seal, and gauge; the wiring, control cables, hydraulics, and pressurization system; the desert-flattened landing gear - all had to be addressed. Corrosion from 40 years of exposure meant pulling every panel, inspecting every rivet, and hand-forming new metal to replace the bad.

In all, volunteers poured roughly 300,000 hours into Doc over more than a decade. Some who started the project did not live to see it finished, and those who remained kept going in their memory.

When Did Doc Fly Again?

Doc returned to the air in July 2016 at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas - about 70 years after the first B-29s climbed into that same Kansas sky.

The team fired up all four Wright engines, each coughing and barking to life before settling into a deep, uneven roar. Doc taxied out, lined up, and lifted off. Along the flight line stood people who had built her as teenagers, watching her climb again over the town that raised them both.

Where Is Doc Now?

Today Doc is one of exactly two airworthy B-29 Superfortresses on the planet - she and Fifi - two aircraft carrying the memory of nearly 4,000. She tours the country, appears at airshows, and welcomes visitors aboard. On some days, she even takes passengers up, so a machine built to fly to war now flies to remind us.

Her survival is the exception. In an era when these bombers were built by the thousand and scrapped when they were done, most are gone forever. Doc endures because a stubborn few decided she was worth saving - and because a generation of builders reached back to reclaim a piece of who they were.

Key Takeaways

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita, Kansas in 1945 and named after the Snow White dwarf.
She served as a radar calibration aircraft, then spent about 42 years as a bombing target at China Lake in the Mojave Desert.
Tony Mazzolini located her in the mid-1980s and secured her release in the late 1990s.
Volunteers - including original wartime workers - invested roughly 300,000 hours over more than a decade to restore her.
Doc first flew again in July 2016 and is now one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world, alongside Fifi.