Doc, the B Twenty-Nine Superfortress Pulled From a Desert Bombing Range and Flown Home to Wichita

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that spent decades as a target on a California bombing range before a group of volunteers recovered her and rebuilt her to flying condition. She made her first post-restoration flight on July 17, 2016, becoming only the second airworthy B-29 in the world alongside the Commemorative Air Force’s “Fifi.” Her recovery and restoration took roughly 18 years and an estimated 300,000 volunteer hours.

What Is the B-29 Doc?

Doc is one of nearly 4,000 B-29 Superfortresses built by Boeing and its partners during World War II. She rolled out of the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, in March 1945 - remember Wichita, because it matters at the end of this story.

The B-29 was the most complicated and most expensive weapons program of the entire Second World War, costing more than the atomic bomb program. It featured a pressurized cabin, remote-controlled gun turrets, and the notoriously temperamental Wright R-3350 engine, which had a habit of catching fire in flight and killing crews before the aircraft ever saw combat. It was a full generation ahead of the B-17 and B-24 in nearly every way.

Why Is She Named Doc?

Doc came off the line at the very end of the war, so she never dropped a bomb in combat. Instead she served as a trainer and later a radar calibration aircraft.

She was assigned to a squadron of B-29s nicknamed after the Seven Dwarfs from Disney’s Snow White - Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, and the rest. This particular airplane was painted with the cartoon of the bespectacled dwarf in the doctor’s coat, and the name stuck: Doc.

How Did Doc End Up on a Bombing Range?

By the mid-1950s, the jet age had made the Superfortress obsolete. The Air Force flew a fleet of them out to the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake in California’s Mojave Desert and staked them to the ground as live-fire targets.

Doc sat in the desert for decades. The paint burned off, the aluminum went dull, rattlesnakes moved into the wheel wells, and rockets and cannon fire chewed up the aircraft around her. Because she’d been parked far enough from the main target line, she escaped the worst of it - but she still took hits and slowly “mummified” in the sun and sand.

Who Rescued Doc?

The rescue began with Tony Mazzolini, an aviation man and veteran who was determined to find a B-29 worth saving. He’d heard rumors of the aircraft graveyard at China Lake, and in 1987 he drove into the desert to see for himself.

Among a row of ruined airframes, Doc stood out. Her fuselage was straight, her wings were intact, and inside, Tony found the little painted dwarf and her name.

Getting her out was another matter. Recovering government property from an active weapons testing range took more than ten years of paperwork and negotiation. She was finally released in 1998, partially disassembled in the sand, and loaded onto trucks.

Why Was Doc Taken to Wichita?

The question was where to send an aircraft that needed one of the deepest, most complete bomber restorations ever attempted. The answer: home.

Doc was trucked back to Wichita, Kansas - the same city where Boeing workers had riveted her together 53 years earlier. That homecoming is where the hardest part of the story begins.

What Did the Restoration Actually Involve?

This was not a weekend fabric-and-dope job on a light aircraft. A B-29 is about 141,000 parts, miles of wiring, and four of the most maintenance-hungry radial engines ever built - and Doc had spent half a century being sandblasted and shot at in the desert.

The corrosion was severe. Volunteers found:

Aluminum eaten thin as a potato chip in places
Control cables seized solid
Rubber components turned to powder
Instruments packed with grit

The hardest problem was parts. Boeing no longer makes B-29 components, and the original tooling was scrapped generations ago. So the volunteers became the factory. Working from original 1940s blueprints, they taught themselves the old sheet-metal techniques, formed new skins, fabricated brackets, and rebuilt entire assemblies to original specification by hand.

Who Are Doc’s Friends?

The volunteer group behind the restoration called themselves Doc’s Friends, and they worked for free - contributing tens of thousands of hours, with some estimates placing the total north of 300,000 hours of labor.

Many were retired Boeing workers, some of whom had actually built B-29s in Wichita during the war. Now in their seventies and eighties, they returned to a hangar to build the airplane of their youth one more time, teaching teenagers how to buck a rivet and passing 1940s assembly-line skills hand to hand to a new generation.

The project began in the late 1990s and stalled more than once when money ran dry. For years it looked like Doc might end up a static museum display. But the crew refused to let her die twice.

How Do You Get Four WWII Radial Engines Flying Again?

Doc is powered by four Wright R-3350 “Duplex-Cyclone” engines - 18 cylinders each, turbocharged, and famously temperamental. These are the same engines that burned down brand-new bombers in 1944.

Getting one running reliably is difficult. Getting all four trustworthy enough to fly over a populated area is close to a miracle. When Doc’s engines lit off for the first time - oil smoke, raw avgas, and that deep, lumpy radial idle no jet can match - volunteers who had spent twenty years on the aircraft stood in tears.

What Did It Take to Get FAA Approval to Fly?

The FAA does not simply issue a fresh airworthiness certificate for a one-off, seventy-year-old, hand-restored bomber. Doc went through extensive inspections, ground runs, and high-speed taxi tests, accelerating down the runway to feel the controls come alive without leaving the ground.

Every system was checked and rechecked, because the margin for error on the first flight of a unique airframe is zero. Any hand-built part made wrong from a 1940s drawing would reveal itself at speed with people aboard.

When Did Doc First Fly Again?

Doc’s first flight came on July 17, 2016, from Wichita - 61 years after she was hauled into the desert to be shot at, and 18 years after Tony Mazzolini pulled her out of it.

With her wheels in the wells and four big radials pulling her up, she climbed into the same Kansas sky she’d first flown in back in 1945. For the first time in more than half a century, there were two airworthy B-29s in the world again.

Why Does a Flying Restoration Matter?

A static airplane in a museum is a photograph; a flying airplane is alive. When Doc taxis to an airshow crowd line with her props ticking over and the ground trembling, spectators can feel in their chests what the aircrews of 1944 knew - the sound, the smoke, and the physical presence of a machine still doing what it was built to do.

The men who flew these bombers were nineteen and twenty years old, freezing at 30,000 feet, watching their engines for the first wisp of fire. No plaque conveys that. Doc is proof that with enough stubbornness and skill, even an aircraft rotting on a bombing range can be brought all the way home. She’s cared for today at the B-29 Doc Hangar and Education Center in Wichita.

Key Takeaways

Doc is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress built in Wichita, Kansas, in March 1945, and named after the Snow White dwarf painted on her nose.
She spent decades as a live-fire target at China Lake before Tony Mazzolini located her in 1987 and secured her recovery in 1998.
The restoration was carried out largely by Doc’s Friends, many of them retired Boeing workers, over an estimated 300,000 volunteer hours.
Volunteers hand-fabricated unavailable parts from original 1940s blueprints, since Boeing no longer makes B-29 components.
Doc flew again on July 17, 2016, becoming the world’s second airworthy B-29 alongside “Fifi.”