Doc, the Last B-Twenty-Nine Superfortress Off the Wichita Line, the Twenty-Nine Year Volunteer Restoration, and the July Morning She Flew Again

On July 17, 2016, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress named Doc took off from McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas - the same city where she was built 71 years earlier. It was the culmination of a 29-year effort and more than 300,000 volunteer hours. For the first time since the 1940s, there were two airworthy B-29s in the world.

The Airplane Tony Mazzolini Found in the Desert

In 1987, a Wichita businessman named Tony Mazzolini was on a contractor visit to China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in the Mojave Desert. Sitting in the California sun - stripped of her engines, oxidized, battered, and actively used as a target for ground crew training exercises - was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Her serial number was 44-69972. She had rolled off the Boeing Wichita assembly line in May 1945, one of 3,970 B-29s built during World War II. By 1987, nearly all of them were gone. The handful that survived sat grounded in museums. Only one was still flying: Fifi, operated by the Commemorative Air Force.

The airplane still had nose art - one of the Seven Dwarfs from the Disney film. The bespectacled one. Doc.

She had served the Navy at China Lake as a systems trainer. Crews practiced egress procedures on her, simulated emergencies, and cannibalized her equipment. When the Navy was finished with her, they left her outside.

Why Mazzolini Couldn’t Walk Away

Mazzolini returned to Wichita, but he couldn’t leave the image behind. This was an airplane built in his city, by workers from his community - a machine that represented the moment American industrial output in the heartland changed the course of a world war. She was being left to die in the desert.

He started making phone calls.

Building Doc’s Friends

What Mazzolini assembled over the following years was a nonprofit organization called Doc’s Friends. The mission: bring Doc home to Wichita and fly her again.

Getting the Navy to release the aircraft took years of negotiation. The transfer came through in the mid-1990s. When Doc arrived in Kansas, she was in worse shape than the desert photographs had suggested. Her four Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines were missing entirely. Gun turrets were gone. Systems had been cannibalized or destroyed. The aluminum was pitted and oxidized from decades of desert exposure.

300,000 Hours of Volunteer Work

The team that gathered around Doc was made up largely of volunteers: retired mechanics, former Boeing employees who had spent careers building airplanes in Wichita, licensed airframe and powerplant mechanics, and people who simply showed up because they wanted to be part of something that mattered. They were paid nothing.

Over the course of the restoration, they logged more than 300,000 volunteer hours.

Finding parts for a B-29 in the 21st century is not a routine exercise. The R-3350 engines alone - each with 18 cylinders and rated at 2,200 horsepower - required a years-long search. Four had to be located, transported, overhauled, and certified. The team sourced components from other B-29s that would never fly again, reverse-engineered parts where original stock no longer existed anywhere on earth, and went back to original Boeing engineering drawings from the 1940s to understand how systems were designed to function.

The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) worked alongside the Doc’s Friends team through the airworthiness certification process required for flying a historic aircraft of this complexity.

Why This Kind of Restoration Is Different

Warbird restoration at this level is not a mechanical puzzle to be solved on the weekend. The people who do this work describe it as something more profound. Every rivet they set is a direct conversation with the worker who set the original rivet in 1945. Every system they bring back to life is a reckoning with engineering that helped end a war.

Doc represented the last chance. If she flew, there would be two flying B-29s in the world. If she didn’t, Fifi would remain the only one.

The First Flight: July 17, 2016

By 2015, the team was in its final push - engines mounted, systems checked, avionics carefully integrated to meet modern airspace requirements without destroying the aircraft’s historical character.

On July 17, 2016, Doc taxied out onto the runway at McConnell Air Force Base. The sound of four R-3350s going to full power stopped every conversation on the ramp. People who had never heard a B-29 before stood with their mouths open. People who had grown up in Wichita when that engine note was the sound of the neighborhood working - those people cried.

Twenty-nine years after Tony Mazzolini stood in the Mojave looking at what most had written off as a dead airplane, Doc flew over Wichita.

Where Doc Is Today

Doc remains active. She and Fifi both work the airshow circuit, which means that in some years, at some shows, two flying B-29s appear in the same sky - something that was unimaginable for most of the past three decades.

Doc is based at Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. The Doc’s Friends organization offers tours of the aircraft and flight experience opportunities for those who want to sit inside the history firsthand.

Key Takeaways

Doc, serial number 44-69972, was the last B-29 off the Boeing Wichita line, built in May 1945 and later used as a ground trainer at China Lake before being abandoned in the Mojave Desert
Tony Mazzolini discovered her in 1987 and founded the nonprofit Doc’s Friends to bring her home and restore her to flight
The restoration required more than 300,000 volunteer hours over approximately two decades, including sourcing all four Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines and reverse-engineering parts from original 1940s Boeing drawings
Doc flew again on July 17, 2016, at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita - 29 years after Mazzolini found her in the desert
Doc and Fifi (operated by the Commemorative Air Force) are the only two airworthy B-29s in the world; Doc is based at Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport