Doc, the Boeing B Twenty-Nine Superfortress, the Desert at China Lake, and the Sixteen-Year Volunteer Restoration That Brought Her Home to Wichita

A Boeing B-29 Superfortress named Doc flew over Wichita, Kansas on July 17, 2016 - 60 years after being parked in the Mojave Desert - completing one of the most ambitious warbird restorations in aviation history. Built on the Wichita production line in 1944, Doc now stands as one of only two airworthy B-29 Superfortresses in the world. The story of her recovery spans four decades of desert storage, years of bureaucratic negotiation, and sixteen years of volunteer labor by hundreds of people who refused to let her disappear.

What Made the B-29 Superfortress Different From Other WWII Bombers

The B-29 was not simply a larger version of what came before it. The Army Air Forces faced a specific strategic problem in the Pacific: Japan was beyond the range of every bomber in the American inventory. A round trip from the Mariana Islands to the Japanese home islands covered roughly 2,000 miles - far beyond the operational reach of a B-17 Flying Fortress or B-24 Liberator.

Boeing answered with a machine that, by 1942 standards, bordered on science fiction. The B-29 was the first production bomber with a pressurized crew compartment, allowing crews to fly at altitude without oxygen masks strapped to their faces and without the brutal cold that killed men in the open waist positions of earlier bombers. Remote-controlled gun turrets, aimed by gunners inside the pressurized fuselage through Plexiglass observation blisters, replaced traditional manually-aimed positions. A central fire control system allowed one gunner to take over multiple turrets simultaneously.

Four Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines powered each aircraft - 18 cylinders arranged in two staggered rows, producing over 2,200 horsepower each. Cruising speed at altitude exceeded 320 mph. Range pushed 3,000 miles.

The R-3350 Engines: Powerful, Problematic, and Persistent

The Wright R-3350s delivered the range and speed the Pacific mission demanded, but they brought serious operational problems. The cowl design caused hot spots. Nacelle geometry trapped heat. Magnesium engine components could ignite, and once a B-29 engine fire started, it spread quickly. Training accidents in the continental United States killed crews at rates that alarmed senior commanders before the aircraft ever reached combat.

Modifications came constantly. The B-29 went into combat over Japan while Boeing and the Army Air Forces were still working the bugs out. Crews learned to manage the engines’ temperament, and the aircraft rewarded good airmanship with genuinely extraordinary performance. By the summer of 1945, nearly 1,000 B-29s were flying from the Mariana Islands under General Curtis LeMay’s Twenty-First Bomber Command - conducting low-level incendiary raids and high-altitude precision strikes night after night.

The war ended when two specially modified B-29s, from a classified program called Silverplate, carried weapons no aircraft had ever carried before.

Why Doc’s Restoration Is Specifically a Wichita Story

3,970 B-29 Superfortresses were built during the war. Boeing’s existing production capacity in Renton, Washington could not meet that demand alone. The Army constructed a massive government-operated plant in Wichita, Kansas, run under Boeing’s management. Wichita built B-29s by the hundreds. The city called itself the Air Capital of the World, and in 1944 and 1945, that title was earned.

Doc came off that Wichita production line in 1944. She flew combat missions in the Pacific during the final year of the war, then was modified and reassigned as most surviving Superfortresses were. She eventually entered Navy inventory, serving in experimental and support roles at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California’s high desert. In 1956, when she was no longer needed, she was parked.

Not scrapped. Not transferred to a museum. Parked.

Forty Years of Desert Storage

Doc sat on the ramp at China Lake for 40 years. The Mojave preserved the aluminum better than any humid-climate storage would have, but four decades had done their work. Corrosion had set in. Systems were seized. Wiring was compromised. The engines would need to be rebuilt from the crankshaft out.

Meanwhile, the B-29 population continued to shrink. Airframes were scrapped or left to deteriorate in open-air storage. A few reached museums as static displays. The Commemorative Air Force operated one flying example - FIFI, based in Texas - but she was the exception. The airframes are enormous, the systems complex, and most organizations looked at the scope of work and chose a different project.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, word circulated in the warbird community: there was a complete, desert-preserved B-29 at China Lake. Word always circulates in this community. What follows is always the harder question.

Tony Mazzolini and the Decision to Act

Wichita businessman Tony Mazzolini heard the same rumors others heard. What he did next was different.

Mazzolini was not a professional restorer or a wealthy warbird collector. He understood what the airplane represented - specifically what it meant to Wichita - that a bomber built by Kansas workers was sitting in the California desert while nothing was being done about it. He began asking who owned her, what a transfer would require, and what it would actually take to bring her home.

The acquisition process took years of paperwork, negotiation, and patience. Government bureaucracy is not designed to transfer aircraft to private citizens, even well-intentioned ones with non-profit organizations. But in the mid-1990s, Doc was successfully transferred to civilian custody. A non-profit called Doc’s Friends was formed with a single stated purpose: not static display, but flight.

How a Sixteen-Year Volunteer Restoration Actually Works

In 1999, Doc was transported from China Lake to Wichita by road - partially disassembled, loaded onto flatbed trucks. The restoration facility was established at Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, where Doc’s Friends built a dedicated hangar.

Doc’s Friends operated not as a professional shop with government contracts and unlimited budgets, but as a volunteer organization. Hundreds of people cycled through over the course of 16 years: retired machinists and aircraft mechanics, veterans and their children, engineers who drove hours to spend a Saturday with a wrench. Some had fathers or grandfathers who had built B-29s on Wichita’s wartime production lines. Some had never touched a World War II aircraft before.

The R-3350 engine rebuilds represented a project within the project. Parts had to be sourced from collections, museums, and aviation salvage operations around the world - and machined from scratch when sourcing failed. Every step required documentation for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Obtaining an experimental airworthiness certificate for a historic aircraft is not a rubber stamp. Every system had to be verified and inspected: fuel, hydraulics, electrics, flight controls, and the pressurization system that had distinguished the B-29 in 1944. Current weight and balance data, flight manuals, and engineering analysis were all required. The documentation alone filled a room.

Doc’s Friends produced all of it, while simultaneously fundraising, organizing charity airshow appearances with the aircraft still static on the ground, and keeping volunteers engaged and bills paid across a span of time that would have ended most projects.

July 17, 2016: Doc Flies Over Wichita for the First Time in Sixty Years

On Sunday, July 17, 2016, Doc’s crew started the four R-3350 radials in sequence at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport. People on the ramp describe the sound as something felt in the chest before it registered as sound - four big radials coming to life one after another, the deep rumble building into something that shook the air and carried out across the Kansas prairie.

Doc taxied out, turned onto the runway, and rolled. She climbed.

She was flying over Wichita - the city that built her - for the first time in 60 years. The crowd included men and women who had worked the wartime production lines as young people, some in their nineties, who had not expected to see a B-29 flying over Kansas again.

After completing the required flight test program for her experimental exhibition certificate, Doc began flying at airshows. She has since carried thousands of visitors on heritage flights and appeared at events across the country, giving people the chance to stand beneath one of these aircraft with the engines running.

Why This Matters: Two Airplanes, 3,970 Built

Of the 3,970 B-29 Superfortresses produced during World War II, two remain airworthy today. Doc, operated by Doc’s Friends out of Wichita. And FIFI, operated by the Commemorative Air Force.

Two airplanes.

The preservation math is unforgiving. Once the last flying example of a type is gone, it is gone. The history these aircraft carry - the engineering achievement, the industrial mobilization, the operational record that helped end the Pacific War - becomes something that can only be described, not demonstrated. Restorations like Doc’s keep the gap between description and experience open for another generation.

The project also demonstrates what sustained community investment and volunteer commitment can accomplish over a decade and a half, when the goal stays clearly in sight and the work keeps moving.

Key Takeaways

• Doc is a 1944-built Boeing B-29 Superfortress from the Wichita production line that spent 40 years in desert storage at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake before being restored to flight.
• The B-29 was the first production bomber with a pressurized crew compartment and was purpose-built for the vast distances of the Pacific Theater, with a range pushing 3,000 miles and cruising speed exceeding 320 mph.
• Tony Mazzolini and the non-profit Doc’s Friends led a 16-year volunteer restoration, transporting Doc from China Lake to Wichita in 1999 and working through full FAA experimental airworthiness certification.
• Doc completed her first flight in 60 years on July 17, 2016, over the Kansas city where she was built.
• Only two B-29 Superfortresses are currently airworthy: Doc (Doc’s Friends, Wichita) and FIFI (Commemorative Air Force) - out of the 3,970 built during World War II.