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Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator, was the last surviving member of the crew he died three years ago at. In this 1945 image taken on the island of Tinian, officers salute each other in front of the Enola Gay as photographers and men look on. The Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the weapon, had 12 crew members aboard. The Superfortress is currently on display at the Museum’s Steven F. The job actually took two decades-approximately 300,000 work hours-to complete. It was the largest restoration project the Museum had ever undertaken, and it was estimated that the project would take seven years. The staff at Garber began restoring the Enola Gay in 1984. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage facility. The bomber remained in outdoor storage until 1961, when Smithsonian staff, concerned about deterioration, disassembled it and moved it indoors to the Paul E. On December 2, 1953, the aircraft made its final flight, landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Air Force transferred it to the Smithsonian in 1949. Tibbets notifies his crew over the intercom and the plane sets course. The weather plane sends a coded message to Enola Gay, advising that Hiroshima is to be the primary target. Many civilians ignore it, unperturbed by the familiar sight of a single B-29 plane flying over the city. After the war it flew in the Operation Crossroads atomic test program in the Pacific, then was delivered to Davis-Monthan Army Airfield, in Arizona, for storage. On the ground, a yellow alert rings out for 22 minutes. Army Air Forces accepted the Enola Gay on June 14, 1945, as World War II was coming to an end. See the gallery below for more images of the Enola Gay, which are from the book unless otherwise noted. Thomas Ferebee used a standard Norden M-9B bombsight coupled to the pilots’ C-1 autopilot to lock in the aim point in central Hiroshima.” About this image, Connor and Moore write: “To drop the Little Boy atomic bomb, Maj. Here we focus on just one, the most famous B-29 Superfortress of all. However, there is no endeavor that better illustrates the unprecedented commitment and national investment in combating America's totalitarian enemies than the pairing of the B-29 and the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb."Ī total of 34 aircraft are featured in this third compilation of cockpit photos by NASM photographers Eric Long and Mark Avino. "Even after the passage of six decades, its role in ending the war and the morality of the atomic bombings continue to be hotly debated.
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"On August 6, 1945, in the first combat use of the atomic bomb, this Army Air Forces Superfortress from the 509th Composite Group dropped the 13-kiloton Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, decimating it," the authors continue. "Of all the World War II aircraft in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum, the most significant is the Enola Gay." So write curators Roger Connor and Christopher Moore in the new Smithsonian book In The Cockpit II: Inside History-Making Aircraft of World War II, published this month by Collins Design.