Doc the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Mojave Desert Discovery, and the Sixteen-Year Restoration That Brought a Second Superfortress Back to Wichita

Doc the Boeing B-29 Superfortress made its first post-restoration flight on July 17, 2016, lifting off from Jabara Airport in Wichita, Kansas - the same city where it was built in 1945. The sixteen-year restoration transformed a fire-damaged, desert-bleached airframe into the world’s second airworthy B-29, joining Fifi as the only two flyable examples of an aircraft type that once numbered nearly four thousand.

What Made the B-29 Superfortress Revolutionary

The B-29 was the most technologically complex aircraft ever built when it entered service in 1944. Boeing engineers stacked unprecedented systems onto a single airframe, then asked crews to fly it ten thousand miles to Japan and back at altitude.

The pressurized cabin was perhaps the most significant breakthrough. Before the B-29, operating above 25,000 feet meant oxygen masks and near-freezing temperatures. The Superfortress maintained a cabin equivalent to 10,000 feet altitude while cruising at 30,000 feet in a heated environment, fundamentally changing what a heavy bomber could accomplish.

The Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines - four of them, each an 18-cylinder radial producing roughly 2,200 horsepower at takeoff - were formidable but notoriously difficult. They ran hot, overheated in tropical conditions, and had a documented tendency to catch fire. Crews monitored cylinder head temperatures the way a rider watches a horse that bites: carefully, and without looking away.

The remote-controlled gun turrets were unlike anything flying at the time. Operated from inside the pressurized fuselage and directed by a central fire control computer, multiple turrets could be aimed at the same target simultaneously. In 1944, this was engineering at the edge of what was physically possible.

The Program That Cost More Than the Manhattan Project

The B-29 program cost $2 billion in wartime dollars - more than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bombs the aircraft eventually delivered. General Hap Arnold committed the entire Army Air Forces budget to the B-29 before the prototype had even flown.

Boeing built Superfortresses at two main facilities: Renton, Washington and Wichita, Kansas. The Wichita plant employed tens of thousands of workers around the clock. Those workers named their aircraft after the seven dwarfs from Snow White - Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Doc.

Doc’s Wartime Service and Postwar Decline

Doc rolled out of the Wichita plant in the spring of 1945. By then the European war was over, and General Curtis LeMay had transformed the Pacific campaign. He pulled B-29s down from high altitude, stripped their defensive guns to save weight, and sent three hundred aircraft in low at night against Japanese cities built largely of wood. Doc flew her part in that campaign.

After the war, the military held thousands of surplus aircraft. B-29s were scrapped by the hundreds. A handful survived as flying test platforms or museum pieces. Doc ended up in California, eventually at Mojave Airport, where she was used as a fire training airframe - meaning firefighting crews practiced suppressing blazes on her, repeatedly.

The 1987 Discovery at Mojave Airport

In 1987, a man named Jack Swayze walked up to Doc at Mojave Airport. The nose gear had collapsed. Fire damage marked multiple areas. Decades of desert sun had stripped the paint from the aluminum. The tires were flat and crumbled.

But the basic structure - fuselage, wings, tail - was still there. Swayze could see what she had been, and he wasn’t willing to watch the desert finish what time had started.

The restoration project changed hands more than once through the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Wichita businessman Tony Mazzolini took a leading role, and the effort finally found the organizational momentum it needed.

The Decision That Changed Everything: Bringing Doc Home

Mazzolini was not a pilot. He was a builder who understood that restoration requires not just money and expertise, but sustained organizational will - the ability to keep a project alive across years when the finish line is nowhere in sight.

His most consequential decision was returning Doc to Wichita, to be restored at Colonel James Jabara Airport - named for the first American jet ace of the Korean War, himself a Kansan. The community that had built Doc in 1945 would rebuild her sixty years later.

The Technical Scale of Restoring a B-29

The Wright R-3350 is no longer manufactured. Neither are most of its parts. The team spent years tracking down four airworthy engines from military surplus, salvaged aircraft, and private collections, with machine shops fabricating components to original engineering specifications.

Across the 141-foot wingspan, the fuel transfer system is a spider web of plumbing. The pressurization system, electrical system, and remote gun turrets - structural elements that couldn’t be removed without altering the aircraft’s load paths - each required individual restoration. On a B-29, every system is connected to every other system in ways that cascade across the entire airframe.

Thousands of volunteer hours went into the work. Sheet metal workers, machinists, former military mechanics, retired airline technicians, and people with no aviation background at all showed up on weekends and holidays. The total cost ran into the tens of millions of dollars, funded almost entirely through donations from people who had never seen the airplane but understood what it represented.

July 17, 2016: Doc Flies Again

On July 17, 2016, after sixteen years of work, Doc lifted off from Jabara Airport.

The four R-3350s came alive one by one. The sound - a low, complicated harmonic felt in the chest before it registers in the ears - returned to the Kansas sky. Blue smoke from the exhaust stacks at startup cleared as the engines settled. The propellers blurred. Doc rolled, then climbed.

Tony Mazzolini was in tears on the ramp. Veterans who had flown B-29s in combat - men in their nineties - watched from the crowd as the aircraft they had last seen in wartime made its pass over a Kansas airport in the twenty-first century.

Doc is now maintained and operated by Doc’s Friends, based in Wichita. She flies the airshow circuit and heritage flights, carrying veterans and their families in the aircraft their fathers and grandfathers flew in combat.

Why Having Two Flying B-29s Matters

Before Doc’s restoration, Fifi - operated by the Commemorative Air Force since the early 1970s - was the only airworthy B-29 on earth. One aircraft representing nearly four thousand built. One aircraft carrying the entire type’s presence in the living sky.

Now there are two.

In warbird terms, two is not a small number. It is the difference between a type on the edge of being lost to flight permanently and a type with a fighting chance of remaining airworthy for another generation. When one aircraft is grounded for maintenance, the other can still fly. The sound of those R-3350s is no longer singular and irreplaceable - it is, just barely, sustainable.

Both Doc and Fifi appear at airshows throughout the year. If you have never heard a B-29 overhead, it belongs on the list. Stand outside when they make their pass, and let the sound of four Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclones work up through the ground.

It’s the sound of sixteen years of people choosing to show up.

Key Takeaways

• Doc was built in Wichita in 1945, discovered in deteriorated condition at Mojave Airport in 1987, and returned to flight on July 17, 2016 after a sixteen-year restoration
• The B-29 program cost $2 billion in wartime dollars - more than the Manhattan Project - making it the most expensive weapons development program of World War II
• The Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines are no longer manufactured; sourcing four airworthy examples for the restoration took years of searching military surplus, private collections, and salvage operations
• Before Doc flew, Fifi (Commemorative Air Force) was the sole airworthy B-29 on the planet out of nearly 4,000 produced; Doc became the second
• Doc is maintained by Doc’s Friends in Wichita and flies heritage missions, airshows, and veteran events across the country