It took its last flight in 1953, arriving on Dec. But even under the custody of the museum, the Enola Gay remained at an air force base in Texas. In the aftermath of World War II, the Army Air Forces flew the Enola Gay during an atomic test program in the Pacific it was then delivered to be stored in an airfield in Arizona before being flown to Illinois and transferred to the Smithsonian in July 1949. While it did not drop the bomb on Nagasaki, the Enola Gay did take flight to get data on the weather in the lead-up to the second strike on Japan.Īfter the war, the airplane took flight a few more times. dropped another atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki. The plane returned to Tinian Island, from which it had come. Shortly after that, the first shock wave hit us, and the plane snapped all over.” All we saw in the airplane was a bright flash. on the turn and ran away as fast as we could.
“Immediately took the airplane to a 180° turn. When the bomb left the airplane, the plane jumped because you released 10,000 lbs.,” Theodore Van Kirk, the plane’s navigator, later recalled. “It was just like any other mission: some people are reading books, some are taking naps. The Enola Gay is a B-29 Superfortress, which pilot Paul Tibbets named after his mother, and which had been stripped of everything but the necessities, so as to be thousands of pounds lighter than an ordinary plane of that make.
