The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context. Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961. In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll.
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Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.Īfter the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the near-complete destruction of the city. Lewis it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. Lieutenant Colonel Tibbets flew the plane to Hiroshima where its. The aircraft was named after the mother of pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. The B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, was named after the mother of pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr.
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The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that was used by the United States on August 6, 1945, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the first time the explosive device had been used on an enemy target.