The B-29 Superfortress 'Doc', the China Lake Bone Yard Where She Sat for Forty Years, and the Volunteer Army That Flew Her Home to Wichita in Twenty-Sixteen

Doc, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, spent more than forty years parked engineless in the Mojave Desert at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake before a volunteer army brought her back to the sky. On July 17, 2016, she lifted off from Wichita Eisenhower National Airport - the same city where she was built in 1944. She remains one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world.

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

The B-29 wasn’t just another heavy bomber. It was the most technologically advanced bomber ever built when it entered service, combining capabilities no previous aircraft had achieved at scale.

The crew flew in a pressurized cabin, allowing them to operate in something close to shirt-sleeve comfort above 30,000 feet - an extreme rarity in wartime bombers, which typically exposed crews to oxygen deprivation and lethal cold. The four Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engines, each producing roughly 2,200 horsepower, pushed it to cruise speeds that made fighter interception genuinely difficult. Bomb capacity ran into the tens of thousands of pounds, deliverable over ranges no previous bomber could match.

Even the defensive armament was a technological leap. Remote-controlled gun turrets were operated by gunners who never physically manned a traditional position. Analog fire-control computers handled the targeting geometry.

How Wichita Became Central to B-29 Production

Boeing ran B-29 production lines in Seattle and Wichita, Kansas. The Glenn L. Martin Company built them in Omaha, and Bell Aircraft ran a line in Marietta, Georgia. But Wichita was the heart of the program.

At the Boeing Wichita plant on the south side of town, production reached one completed aircraft per day at its peak, run across multiple shifts. Workers - many of them with no prior factory experience - were producing the most sophisticated bomber in the world. More than 1,000 B-29s came off that production line before the war ended.

Doc was one of them. She rolled off the line in 1944, destined for the Pacific theater. The B-29 program carried out the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities and the atomic missions that ended the war.

Why Seven B-29s Were Named After Snow White’s Dwarfs

After the war, the military faced a disposition problem for thousands of aircraft with no wartime mission. Most B-29s were scrapped or converted. Seven were sent to the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, roughly 150 miles north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert.

The Navy named them after Snow White’s seven dwarfs: Doc, Happy, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Dopey. Their role was practical - maintenance training. Mechanics could work the systems, pull engines, and troubleshoot without concern for whether the airframe ever flew again. It was useful, but hard on the aircraft.

Over the years, systems were cannibalized, engines stripped, and airframes used up. One by one, six of the seven were destroyed - used as targets, cut apart, or simply worn out. Doc survived, not through any deliberate preservation effort. She outlasted the others. By the 1980s, she sat in the desert with no engines, her aluminum skin faded to a weathered gray.

How Tony Mazzolini Spotted Doc from a Commercial Flight

In 1987, Tony Mazzolini, an aviation enthusiast from Ohio, was aboard a commercial flight crossing over the Mojave. Looking out the window, he saw the unmistakable shape below: the greenhouse nose, the long smooth fuselage, the distinctive twin tail fins.

He recognized it as a B-29.

Mazzolini researched what he’d seen and decided to pursue her release. That process took years. The Navy wasn’t opposed, but releasing a military aircraft involves bonding requirements, restoration commitments, and significant paperwork. Mazzolini established Doc’s Friends, a non-profit formed specifically for this purpose, and eventually secured Navy approval - with conditions. If the project failed, Doc returned to the Navy.

The Volunteer Restoration That Took Sixteen Years

Around the turn of the century, Doc was carefully disassembled, loaded onto flatbed trucks, and driven across the desert and the Kansas plains to Wichita - back to the city where she was built.

The call for volunteers produced a remarkable response. Engineers, mechanics, aviation enthusiasts, and people who simply cared about what this airplane represented showed up on weekends and evenings, driving in from across Kansas and neighboring states. Among them were men in their eighties who had worked on the Boeing Wichita B-29 production line during the war - men who hadn’t touched one of these aircraft in sixty years.

The technical scope was enormous. Doc needed four complete Wright R-3350 radial engines. No manufacturer produces those engines today. Every part had to be sourced from other aircraft - components pulled from museum collections, boneyards, and private holdings across the country. Every fitting, gasket, line, and valve had to be found, inspected, adapted, or fabricated from scratch.

The team worked from original documentation where it existed and from first principles where it didn’t. They corresponded with surviving Boeing engineers, combed through wartime factory records, and consulted people who had actually worked on these aircraft during the war. Funding came entirely from donations, airshow appearances, and merchandise. There was no government grant program for a project like this. There were lean years. The project survived them.

Doc’s First Flight in Over Sixty Years

On July 17, 2016 - sixteen years after restoration work began in earnest - Doc taxied out at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport with four Wright radials running.

The sound of a large radial engine at power is physical before it’s audible - a pulse felt in the chest and jaw before the ears register it. Four of them together on an aircraft exceeding 100,000 pounds, wound up to takeoff power after more than sixty years of silence, was not background noise. It was an event.

Doc lifted off. She flew over Wichita - over downtown, over the south side of town where the Boeing plant stood. People on the ground who heard the engines stopped what they were doing and looked up. The flight lasted approximately two hours.

When Doc landed and the crew stepped out, Tony Mazzolini was on the ramp - twenty-nine years after spotting her from an airliner window over the Mojave. Hundreds of people watched from the ramp: volunteers who had given thousands of hours over sixteen years, Boeing employees active and retired, and families of workers who had built B-29s in Wichita during the war.

Where Doc Flies Today

Doc is based at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport and operates out of the B-29 Doc Hangar, Education and Visitors Center, a purpose-built facility that houses the aircraft and tells the story of the B-29 program and the Wichita workers who built it. She flies the airshow circuit each season and offers ride flights when scheduling allows.

She is one of two airworthy B-29 Superfortresses in existence. The other is Fifi, operated by the Commemorative Air Force. Two flying examples, out of nearly 4,000 built.

Key Takeaways

• The B-29 Superfortress was the most technologically advanced bomber of its era, introducing a pressurized cabin, remote-controlled turrets with analog fire control, and four Wright R-3350 radial engines producing roughly 2,200 hp each.
• Seven B-29s were sent to China Lake after WWII and named after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. Six were eventually destroyed. Doc survived by simply outlasting the others.
• Tony Mazzolini spotted Doc from a commercial flight in 1987 and spent years securing her release through the Navy, establishing the non-profit Doc’s Friends to make it happen.
• The restoration took sixteen years and was driven almost entirely by volunteers, including WWII-era Boeing workers who had built B-29s in Wichita decades earlier.
• Doc made her first flight in over sixty years on July 17, 2016, and remains one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world.