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PostPosted: Tue May 31, 2022 9:30 am 
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What’s up? Doc
Ride along as Seattle-area Boeing historians and archivists take to the skies on a restored B-29 bomber.

https://bit.ly/3lQYwZm

Quote:
It was a crisp, blue-sky afternoon at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. “Doc” – one of just two airworthy Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers – sat by itself in the middle of the tarmac as the sunshine reflected off its silver, shiny polished aluminum skin. After spending several days in Spokane for an airshow, the plane was ready to depart for Seattle’s Boeing Field – the next destination on its 2022 “History Restored Tour.”

The four radial engines were started up at a quarter past two, and just before 2:30, the airplane lifted effortlessly off the runway and floated gracefully into the sky. On board were six crewmembers, including the pilot, copilot and flight engineer, and four members of Boeing’s Historical Services team, among them Boeing’s chief historian, Mike Lombardi (pictured below), whose history with Doc goes back 20 years.

In May 2000, Doc arrived in Wichita, Kansas, after spending more than 40 years rotting away in a desert. In need of some serious TLC, hundreds of volunteers – many of them Boeing employees and retirees – began working to restore the airplane. Lombardi and his team in the Boeing Archives were looped into the project a couple years later, and provided a number of drawings and manuals to assist with the complex restoration.

“I’ve followed the plane for a long time, but hadn’t ever seen it in person,” Lombardi said. So seeing it for the first time was a bit emotional for him. “It brought a tear to my eye… it’s just beautiful.”

En route to Seattle, the plane flew low and slow, staying at or below 6,500 feet and flying at speeds just under 200 knots. The flight path followed a gradual southwestern trajectory over the desert plains of eastern Washington to Moses Lake, before swooping back up through the Cascade Mountains and into the Seattle area.

Passengers had free rein to move about the airplane, from the bombardier’s seat in the iconic glass-enclosed nose, all the way to the tail gunner’s position. To travel the 99 feet from nose to tail requires walking through the forward crew compartment, crawling through a 35-foot tunnel to the rear crew compartment, then crouching low to the ground through the tail section.

When the B-29 was in active military service, it was able to fly as high as 31,000 feet because the crew compartments were pressurized. The tunnel allowed crewmembers to move about freely between the forward and rear compartments while at cruising altitude. However, the tail gunner had a separate pressurized area that could only be left during unpressurized flight.

The flight from Spokane to Seattle took just over an hour, giving passengers ample time to truly appreciate all the moving parts that work together to keep the heavy bomber airborne. It got Lombardi thinking about the team of Boeing engineers who designed the plane. “I was looking out at the wing thinking… ‘That’s the wing Schairer designed,’ and thinking about all the designers, the machinists, and everyone else who brought this plane to life.”

George Schairer’s wing design is one of the most revolutionary – and perhaps most aesthetically pleasing – characteristics of the B-29. Known as the Boeing 117 airfoil, the wing is very long and narrow, allowing the plane to fly fast and high, and giving it incredible range. An expert in aerodynamics, Schairer is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on the swept wing for the B-47. He also was part of the famous team of Boeing engineers who redesigned the B-52 over the course of one weekend in Dayton, Ohio.

During the flight, Lombardi couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like flying these big, loud, rugged airplanes back in the 1940s. “And that’s what this is all about… remembering and memorializing the young men who flew, fought and died in these airplanes,” he said. “I just think about the sacrifice they made so we can live free today.”

And while thousands of servicemen were flying these planes in combat, Boeing pilots continued testing the two XB-29 prototypes in Seattle. Lombardi thinks of Doc as a memorial to them as well.

“When we were on approach to Boeing Field, I felt a bit somber when I realized we were on the same path as Eddie Allen on that horrible day in 1943,” Lombardi said, referring to a crash that killed Boeing’s renowned test pilot.

On Feb. 18, 1943, Eddie Allen, the B-29 program’s chief pilot, took the second XB-29 prototype up on its ninth flight. The plane was about 30 miles south of Seattle when the No. 1 engine caught fire. Allen made every attempt to safely return to the airport, but the fire quickly spread and the plane crashed into the Frye Packing Company on the north end of Boeing Field. All 11 crewmen, including Allen, were killed, as were 20 Frye employees and a firefighter.

That somber feeling ended rather abruptly, however, when the flight engineer turned to the passengers in the forward compartment and said, “Want to see the nose gear go down?” before proceeding to open the hatch door above the wheel well. “I was sitting across from him in the navigator’s position and could look straight down at the ground rushing by beneath the plane,” Lombardi said.

Upon Doc’s arrival at Boeing Field, the plane was greeted by dozens of aviation enthusiasts, members of the media, and staff from the Museum of Flight – the host organization. The plane and its crew stayed in town for about a week, offering cockpit tours to the public and performing nearly a dozen 30-minute flights around Puget Sound. This was Doc’s first visit to Seattle, but local aviation enthusiasts and history buffs are certainly hoping it won’t be the last.

The mission of “Doc’s Friends” – the nonprofit organization that maintains and operates the airplane – is to honor the men and women who sacrificed so much for the freedom of others, including those who designed, built, maintained and flew the B-29 during and after World War II; to connect people with the rich heritage of the B-29 and allow aviation enthusiasts to experience the thrill of a B-29 up close; and to educate today’s and future generations on the contributions of the Greatest Generation during wartime.

And according to Lombardi, they’re doing a great job fulfilling that mission.

“You read about World War II and it’s black and white… it doesn’t feel real; but when you see something like Doc… it’s real, it’s in color and it brings a realism to it all,” he said. “This is about touching history.”

Please note, the below video has no dialogue.


History of "Doc"

All photos and video courtesy of the Boeing Archives.

On Sept. 21, 1942, the first Boeing XB-29 – prototype for the venerable B-29 Superfortress – made its maiden flight from Seattle’s Boeing Field. Eighty years later, of the nearly 4,000 B-29s built through 1946, only two remain airworthy. One of them is B-29 No. 44-69972, built in Wichita, Kansas, and delivered to the U.S. Army in March 1945. Today, that airplane is known simply as “Doc.”

Doc is one of 1,644 B-29s built at Boeing’s Plant II in Wichita as part of the nationwide wartime effort to build the “Arsenal of Democracy.” During World War II, the U.S. churned out more than 300,000 airplanes – Boeing and its heritage companies built about a third of them. But since the war ended just months after Doc was delivered, the airplane never saw combat.
B-29 production at Boeing Wichita during World War II.

In 1951, Doc earned its name when it joined a radar survey squadron known as the Seven Dwarfs, based at Griffis Air Force Base, New York, where it remained for four years. It was then used as a target tug, before being relegated to China Lake, California, in 1956, to serve as a target for bomb training. For the next 30 years, Doc just sat, rotting away in the hot, dry Mojave Desert.

In 1987, a man named Tony Mazzolini found the warbird and became intent on restoring it to airworthy status. As the saying goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” In 1998, Mazzolini and his team were finally able to tow Doc out of the desert. The airplane was split into several sections that were brought on flatbed trailers to Wichita in May 2000.
An article from the May 5, 2000, edition of Boeing News.

Over the next 16 years, hundreds of passionate, dedicated volunteers – including Boeing employees and retirees – worked to restore Doc. The first several years of restoration took place in Boeing’s Experimental Flight Hangar, and in 2007 the airplane was moved to the Kansas Aviation Museum where the rest of the work was completed.

Please note, the below video has no dialogue.

On July 17, 2016, Doc lifted off from McConnell Air Force Base on its first flight in 60 years. In July 2017, Doc joined the Commemorative Air Force’s “FIFI” – the other flying B-29 – at the EAA AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for a historic flight marking the first time in more than half-a-century that two B-29 Superfortresses shared the same airspace.

Today, Doc is maintained by Doc’s Friends, a 501c3 nonprofit formed in 2013 to oversee the restoration project and operate the airplane going forward. In September 2017, crews broke ground on the 32,000 sq. ft. B-29 Doc Hangar and Education Center in Wichita. Boeing provided a major gift toward the state-of-the-art facility, which opened to the public in January 2019.

By Annie Flodin

To ensure stories like this show up in your news feed, be sure to join BNN’s Our History channel.


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