Doc the B-Twenty-Nine Superfortress: From the Mojave Desert to the Kansas Sky

Doc, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita, Kansas in 1945, is one of only two airworthy examples of the aircraft that defined long-range strategic bombing in World War II. After 42 years abandoned at a California naval weapons range, she was rescued by volunteers, restored over 16 years, and returned to flight on July 17, 2016 - above the same city where she was built.

The Most Complicated Machine America Had Ever Mass-Produced

By 1944, Boeing’s Wichita plant was running three shifts a day, seven days a week, producing the B-29 Superfortress. The workforce included thousands of civilians with no prior manufacturing experience, learning precision aircraft assembly on the job. The stakes were enormous: the B-29 was intended to be the instrument of strategic victory in the Pacific, and it had to work at scale.

The program nearly collapsed before it got there.

In February 1943, the second XB-29 prototype caught fire on a test flight over Seattle. Eddie Allen, Boeing’s chief test pilot, was at the controls. The fire began in an engine nacelle, spread beyond control, and the aircraft went down into a meatpacking plant near the city. Allen and his entire crew died, along with workers in the building below.

The Battle of Kansas

The engine responsible was the Wright R-3350, an 18-cylinder radial producing over 2,200 horsepower. On paper it was exactly what the B-29 needed. In practice, it had a persistent tendency to overheat and catch fire, particularly during the ground runups and low-altitude climbs that bomber operations demanded. The cowling trapped heat. Oil lines ran too close to the exhaust. Every fix revealed another compromise.

By spring 1944, hundreds of B-29s sat grounded across Kansas and surrounding states, waiting on parts and modifications that couldn’t arrive fast enough. General Hap Arnold, commanding the Army Air Forces, flew to Kansas personally and made clear that the aircraft needed to start flowing to the Pacific - immediately.

The period that followed became known as the Battle of Kansas. Mechanics worked through the night in sub-zero temperatures, fixing the same engine problems that would kill crews over the Pacific months later. It was unglamorous, essential work. They got it done.

The Pacific Campaign and the Atomic Missions

From airfields on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, B-29s flew over 3,000 miles of open Pacific to strike Japanese industrial cities. High-altitude formation bombing in the jet stream proved largely ineffective. General Curtis LeMay shifted tactics to low-altitude night raids with incendiary weapons. The results, and the losses, were catastrophic on both sides.

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, two B-29s lifted off from Tinian and changed the nature of warfare. Enola Gay and Bockscar carried the first nuclear weapons used in combat. Whatever one’s view of those decisions, the B-29 is the machine that made them possible.

Doc’s Origins: Built in Wichita, Never Flew Combat

The aircraft the world would come to know as Doc rolled off the Wichita assembly line in 1945. The war ended before she flew a combat mission. She transitioned to stateside trainer duties, then eventually found her way to the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in the California high desert, where the Navy used modified B-29s as control aircraft in early guided missile testing programs.

When that program ended in 1956, the aircraft were simply left where they sat. No transfer orders. No ferry mission. No plan. They were parked, tied down, and forgotten.

Forty-Two Years in the Mojave

The Mojave Desert is an unintentionally effective preservation environment for aluminum airframes. Humidity - the primary driver of corrosion - is nearly absent. The dry air slows oxidation significantly, even as the extreme temperature swings stress the metal day after day.

Doc sat in the dirt at China Lake for 42 years.

Multiple generations of pilots earned licenses, built hours, and flew past the California high desert with no idea that one of a handful of surviving Superfortresses was parked behind a restricted perimeter fence a few miles away.

A Man Stops His Car on a Desert Road

In 1998, a warbird enthusiast named Tony Mazzolini was driving near China Lake when a shape through the perimeter fence stopped him cold. The double-bubble fuselage profile of a B-29 is unmistakable. Mazzolini knew it immediately.

He pulled over, got out of the car, and looked at what the Navy had abandoned. Then he went home and started making phone calls.

Getting a decommissioned aircraft off an active, classified weapons testing range is not a quick process. Mazzolini spent years navigating official channels, documenting the aircraft, and building a coalition of supporters. He connected with people in Wichita who had their own reasons to care - the community where B-29s were built hadn’t forgotten, even if the rest of the country had.

The Navy eventually agreed to donate the aircraft - not sell it - to a Wichita nonprofit. That group named themselves Doc’s Friends, after the informal nickname the aircraft had acquired somewhere in her Navy service.

Doc arrived back in Wichita in 2000.

Sixteen Years, Eight Hundred Volunteers

The restoration was not a well-funded institutional project. It was volunteers - eventually more than 800 of them at peak, over a 16-year span.

They came from every direction. Retired airline mechanics who wanted to work a round engine again. Homebuilders from the local EAA chapter. College engineering students on capstone projects. Korean War veterans who had maintained these exact aircraft decades earlier and still remembered the torque specs.

The technical challenges were serious. The Wright R-3350 radials required complete overhaul, and parts for an engine out of production since the early 1950s don’t appear on shelves. The pressurization system had to be rebuilt from scratch. The plexiglass in the sighting blisters had yellowed and cracked beyond use. Miles of electrical wiring had to be traced, tested, and replaced throughout the airframe. Fuel tanks were resealed. Control surfaces were evaluated for structural integrity.

Every decision was held to a flying standard, not a museum standard. The FAA was involved throughout, and the working relationship Doc’s Friends built with the agency over years of careful documentation proved as important as any individual maintenance task.

Return to Flight

By spring 2016, Doc was ready.

The engines ran. The systems checked out. Test flights proceeded incrementally. On July 17, 2016, Doc lifted off from McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita - a few miles from the Boeing plant where she had been built more than 70 years earlier.

The volunteers who watched it happen included mechanics in their eighties who had worked these aircraft when they were simply the latest tool of the trade, and college students who had started on the project as freshmen and were there at the finish. When the four Wright radials spooled up and that unmistakable rumble filled the Kansas air, many of them wept openly.

Doc Today: One of Two Airworthy B-29s on Earth

Doc is now one of only two airworthy B-29s in existence. The other is FIFI, owned by the Commemorative Air Force, which has been flying since the 1970s.

Doc is based at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita. She flies at airshows around the country and carries passengers. Among them, occasionally, are veterans who flew in aircraft exactly like her - men now in their nineties who climb those aft entry stairs one more time and remember what it felt like to be young and flying something that mattered.

The aircraft outlasted the war she was built for, the Cold War she was repurposed for, and four decades of desert abandonment. She came back not through government funding or corporate investment, but because one man stopped his car on a desert road and a city hadn’t forgotten where she came from.

Key Takeaways

• Doc is a 1945 B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita that never flew combat; she served in Cold War missile testing at China Lake before being abandoned in 1956.
• Tony Mazzolini discovered her through the China Lake perimeter fence in 1998 after 42 years in the Mojave Desert.
• The nonprofit Doc’s Friends accepted a Navy donation of the aircraft, trucked her to Wichita, and restored her using 800+ volunteers over 16 years.
• Doc made her first post-restoration flight on July 17, 2016, from McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita - near the plant where she was built.
• She is one of only two airworthy B-29s on Earth, alongside FIFI of the Commemorative Air Force.