Senior Editor

Jerry Siebenmark

After 18 years in Wichita, the restored Boeing B-29 Superfortress named “Doc” has settled in to a permanent home in the city where the sleek, World War II-era bomber was built 75 years earlier. The B-29,&nbsp;powered by four Wright Cyclone R-3350-26WD air-cooled, twin-row, radial engines,&nbsp;is now being readied for its third season of touring airshows across the country. On March 9, the $6.5 million B-29 Doc Hangar, Education and Visitors Center at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport opened to the public, seeing an average of between 200 and 250 visitors a week, Doc’s Friends general manager and executive director Josh Wells told&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;on April 26.&nbsp;

 


Doc’s Friends is the nonprofit group that owns the airplane, which ironically spent much of its life as a bombing target at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake until a group in California led by Tony Mazzolini plucked Doc from its Mojave Desert resting place. Mazzolini later brought the airplane to the former Boeing Wichita, where over nearly two decades, a group of 300 volunteers—some of whom worked on the original B-29 production line—restored the bomber, best known as the type that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 


Completed in December 2018 after 10 months of construction, the 39,000-sq-ft facility comprises a 24,000-sq-ft hangar and maintenance bay framed by glass panels on the front of the building that frame Doc’s 141-ft wingspan. The panels allow for a complete frontal view of the B-29 from the street. A mezzanine floor offers visitors an overhead view of the 99-ft-long airplane as well as interactive exhibits—including a bomb bay tube for children to climb through—that tell the history of Doc, its nearly 16-year restoration, and more broadly, the B-29. Doc, which originally hailed from a squadron named Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world.

 


“Our facility allows us to do what we set out to do, which is to operate the airplane in a way that the public can see it,” Wells said. “We can continue, for generations to come, to carry on the legacy not only of those men and women who built, designed and flew the aircraft during World War II and in Korea, but also our team, our volunteers, our heroes in California and Wichita, who have spent their lives putting the airplane back together.”

 


The building is open to the public three days a week: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays, when Doc isn’t on tour. And Doc’s tour schedule is about to ramp up. A partial schedule shows that Doc’s first stop of the season will be from May 25 to 26 at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum &amp; Planetarium in Oklahoma. Other scheduled stops so far in 2019 include: June 15 to 16 at Whiteman Air Force Base’s “Wings Over Whiteman” airshow in Missouri; Heavy Bombers Weekend July 19-21 in Madison, Wisconsin; EAA Air Venture July 22-28 in Oshkosh; and Sheppard Air Force Base Open House October 26-27 in Wichita Falls, Texas. Wells explained that’s only a third of the B-29’s planned tour schedule, and additional shows and dates will be announced once agreements are finalized.

 


Since coming out of winter maintenance in March, Doc&nbsp;has accumulated about 15 flight hours, Wells noted.

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