While this exhibit is now closed, Museum specialists continued to restore the remaining components of the airplane, and after an additional nine years the fully assembled Enola Gay went on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. and others explain, delivering a 10,000-pound bomb to southern Japan was a years-long endeavor that required patience, practice, and precision. Paul Tibbets, who named the B-29 the 'Enola Gay' after his mother, told Caron to describe what.
The Enola Gay was 10 miles away when the blast. The exhibition text summarized the history and development of the Boeing B-29 fleet used in bombing raids against Japan.Īnother portion of the exhibit detailed the painstaking efforts of Smithsonian aircraft restoration specialists who had spent more than a decade restoring parts of the Enola Gay for this exhibition. On August 6, 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb designed at Los Alamos on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. An aerial view of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. pilot's seat of Enola Gay moments before takeoff on WWII air raid mission to drop 1st atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The components on display included two engines, the vertical stabilizer, an aileron, propellers, and the forward fuselage that contains the bomb bay.Ī video presentation about the Enola Gay's mission included interviews with the crew before and after the mission including mission pilot Col. It was a clear sky and was pretty warm for. The worst bombing ever in history I remember was Hiroshima in 1945. I stop the car and line it up on the center of Runway Able, trying to recreate the movements of Enola Gays pilot, Col. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. Pilot of Enola Gay Friday, March 21, 2008. This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender. However, on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay strained to get off the ground as a result of the 10,000-pound atom bomb that made the B-29.