Following delivery to the US Twelfth Air Force, the aircraft was assigned to the 393rd Bombardment Squadron (VH) of the 315th Bombardment Wing, receiving individual aircraft number 82.
The aircraft was named for the mother of Colonel Paul Tibbets, who flew the aircraft on the Hiroshima mission.Įnola Gay was one of the 536 B-29s built at the Martin-Omaha plant from mid 1944. It is famed for dropping the world's first nuclear bomb used in warfare, which was dropping the Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress. You can help the Aircraft Wiki by expanding it.Įnola Gay on the ground, showing the arrowhead painted on the tail in place of the group letter This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.This article is a stub. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on. Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. Today the Enola Gay remains in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC while Bockscar is in the collection of the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. So what is largely forgotten is that while Bock didn't pilot Bockscar he was in fact present in the other B-29, The Great Artiste, which was used for scientific measures and photography of the effects caused by the release of Fat Man. When Sweeney and his crew were chosen to deliver the Fat Man while Bock and his crew were chosen to provide observation support the decision was made to swap the crews rather than to move the complex instrumentation equipment. Sweeney had used Bockscar for more than ten training and practice missions even though he and his usual crew had piloted another aircraft named The Great Artiste. Yet it wasn’t Bock who piloted the aircraft he had named on August 9, 1945. In the case of Bockscar -not to be confused with the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar -the moniker was a play on Captain Frederick Bock's last name, who had previously participated in air raids on Japan that were launched from parts of China controlled by the Allies.
Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, had named his aircraft for his mother “Enola Gay Tibbets” (1893–1983) who herself was named after the heroine of the novel Enola or, Her Fatal Mistake. What is also notable about the two aircraft is that their respective pilots who regularly flew the aircraft named the planes. 50 caliber machine guns and one twenty-millimeter cannon in the tail, these modified aircraft had retailed the tail guns and even had their armor removed to save weight to be able to carry the extremely dangerous atomic bombs at extreme flight distances. 50 caliber machine guns in remote-controlled turrets along with two additional. Bockscar was actually one of fifteen specially modified “Silverplate” B-29s that were assigned to the 509th Composite Group.