Opening to Public in December

One of WWII's most-famous airplanes, the B-29 Enola Gay, named for pilot Paul Tibbetts's mom, was shown as a fully-restored aircraft to the press in Washington, D.C.

The machine was the one that dropped the first nuclear weapon used in wartime, a strange-looking device called "Little Boy." That one bomb, on August 6, 1945, destroyed most of Hiroshima, and killed well over 100,000 people. On August 9, Enola Gay flew weather recce for Major Charles Sweeney's Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the orange-painted "Fat Man," the second nuke -- on its secondary target, Nagasaki. The war was over six days later.

Enola Gay is all together now. From 1949, when she was donated to the Smithsonian, until 1960, Enola Gay sat outside at Andrews AFB, with no one having the time, money, or inclination to do much about her restoration. She's been a partial exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum for ten years, with just a bit of her forward fuselage in evidence; now she's at the Smithsonian's Dulles International exhibit, again in one piece.

The new exhibit doesn't try, as a Clinton-era attempt did, to make social statements about the horrors of nuclear war. It's pretty much just the airplane. The narrow focus seems to say, 'viewers can learn all they want about the airplane at the museum, and all they want to know about the horrors of nuclear war from Social Sciences classes.' It's clear the Smithsonian doesn't want to open that can of worms again.

The exhibit opens officially December 15. Bockscar? It's been on display at the USAF Museum at Dayton's Wright Patterson AFB since it flew there from the boneyard at Davis Monthan in 1961.

FMI: www.theenolagay.com/plane.html