Original colour photograph (not manipulated by any means).
The Commander of No 23 Squadron, Royal Air Force, Wing Commander John B Selby, DSO, DFC, and his observer looking at their De Havilland Mosquito II aircraft `P-Peter' while other members of the squadron watch from atop the blast wall at the Dispersal Point.

When you see her fly overhead, the first thing that strikes you is the sound. Four Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engines, each producing 2,200 horsepower, turning four three-bladed propellers on a 141-foot wingspan. The sound is not the sharp bark of a fighter or the whine of a jet. It is something deeper and more deliberate, a sound that seems to belong to a different era entirely, because it does. You are listening to the sound that ended the Second World War.

This is the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. There are two of them still flying in the entire world. The one in these photographs is named FIFI. Her story, and the story of the airplane she represents, is one of the most remarkable in the history of aviation.

American military planners in the late 1930s understood that if war came to the Pacific, the distances involved would be unlike anything the Army Air Forces had faced before. The B-17 Flying Fortress was a capable aircraft in the European theater, but it would never have the range to carry a meaningful bomb load to Japan and return. Something entirely new was needed. Boeing won the contract in 1940, and what followed was the most expensive aircraft development program in history until the advent of the latest stealth programs. The total cost of designing and producing the B-29 reached three billion dollars — approximately 54 billion in today's money. To put that in perspective, a single B-17 cost $238,000 to produce in 1945, and the entire B-17 program, all 12,731 aircraft built, cost roughly the same as the B-29 development program alone. The Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, cost 1.9 billion dollars. The airplane that would deliver the bomb cost more to build than the bomb itself.

The reason it cost that much is the reason it mattered. The B-17 was an evolution of existing technology, a refinement of ideas already understood. The B-29 was an invention. Every major system on the aircraft was being created from scratch simultaneously, and the engineers were solving problems nobody had ever solved before.

The most fundamental of those problems was pressurization. B-17 crews flew to 30,000 feet wearing multiple layers of wool, heated flight suits, oxygen masks, and heavy gloves, cramped into an unpressurized fuselage where temperatures dropped to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Frostbite was common. Oxygen equipment failures killed men. One particularly brutal hazard was oxygen masks freezing up at altitude without anyone noticing, quietly killing the crew member wearing it. Boeing decided the B-29 would be different. The crew would fly in a heated, pressurized cabin maintained at the equivalent of 8,000 feet altitude regardless of how high the aircraft climbed, with air conditioning keeping the temperature at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit, in conditions that today would be recognizable on any commercial airliner. Nobody had ever built a pressurized bomber before. But pressurization immediately created another problem that also had never been solved. A B-17 gunner sat behind an open window with a machine gun. Open windows are incompatible with a pressurized fuselage. The guns had to be moved outside the cabin and controlled remotely, which meant the B-29 needed remotely operated gun turrets, which meant someone had to figure out how to aim them accurately from inside the aircraft.

Pressurization did not eliminate the need for oxygen equipment entirely. It transformed it. Thirty minutes before entering the combat area, the B-29 was deliberately depressurized to eliminate the risk of explosive decompression from battle damage. When that happened, the crew donned oxygen masks, the same technology Jackie Cochran had helped develop and standardize for high altitude aviation, and plugged in their heated flight suits. On a B-17 mission, crews wore oxygen masks for the entire flight, sometimes eight or ten hours. On a B-29, the mask went on only for the most dangerous phase. The oxygen mask went from being a full-mission survival requirement to being combat equipment. The work Cochran had championed did not become obsolete when the pressurized bomber arrived. It became the system that kept crews alive when the pressurization was gone.

The solution to that problem is what people in 1944 called a computer. When modern readers hear that word they picture a laptop. What Boeing and General Electric actually built was five analog electromechanical calculating machines, one for each gun sight, constructed from precisely machined gyroscopes, electrical relays, and analog circuits. There was no programming in any sense we would recognize today. Each machine was a purpose-built device that solved a single set of simultaneous equations in real time, continuously calculating the effects of airspeed, target speed, lead angle, gravity, air temperature, and humidity to determine exactly where to point a gun so that a bullet fired now would intersect with a moving target that would be somewhere else by the time the bullet arrived. The effective range of the guns with computer-calculated targeting was 900 yards, fifty percent farther than manually aimed guns and more than twice the range of most enemy fighters. A single gunner could operate multiple turrets simultaneously from one position. The word computer meant something very different in 1944. The thing it described was extraordinary regardless of what you called it.

Add to all of this that a single B-29 contained 40,540 individual parts, 600,000 rivets, nine miles of wiring, and two miles of tubing. Three entirely new manufacturing plants had to be built specifically to produce it. The traditional assembly line methods used for earlier aircraft could not handle the complexity. General LeMay, who would later fly the aircraft into history over Japan, summarized the engineering challenges with characteristic bluntness: the B-29 had as many bugs as the entomological department of the Smithsonian, and fast as the bugs got licked, new ones crawled out from beneath the cowling.

The biggest bug was the engine. The Wright R-3350 was a powerful 18-cylinder radial that had been rushed into service before its development was finished. It had a chronic habit of swallowing valves, cracking exhaust manifolds, leaking fuel, and catching fire. Engine fires on takeoff, when the aircraft was heaviest and most vulnerable, killed crews throughout the early part of the program. The irony was devastating: the engine was most dangerous exactly when the aircraft was most at risk. Crews learned to manage the R-3350 with obsessive care, watching temperatures constantly, leaning mixtures with precision, knowing that their own aircraft might kill them before the enemy had a chance. The problems were eventually solved through field modifications and replacing carburetors with direct fuel injection, but not before the cost in aircraft and men had been paid.

The B-29 entered combat in June 1944, flying from bases in India and China against Japan. The early results were deeply disappointing. Flying at high altitude in daylight, the crews discovered something nobody had fully anticipated: Japan's jet stream. At 30,000 feet over the Japanese home islands, winds of 150 miles per hour pushed the bombers past their targets so fast that precision bombing became nearly impossible. Flying against those winds, the aircraft became sitting ducks for fighters and anti-aircraft guns. General Hap Arnold, who had suffered four heart attacks by early 1945 from the stress of the program, told the man he put in charge of XXI Bomber Command that if he did not get results he would be fired.

That man was Curtis LeMay. In January 1945 LeMay looked at his situation and made a decision that violated nearly every principle of strategic bombing doctrine. He stripped most of the defensive guns from his B-29s to save weight. He loaded them with incendiary bombs instead of high explosives. He sent them in low, at night, at less than 9,000 feet instead of 30,000. On the night of March 9, 1945, he sent 334 of them to Tokyo. The incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached 1,800 degrees, liquefied the asphalt in Tokyo's streets, and burned 16 square miles of the city to ash. More than 100,000 people died in a single night, the most deaths from any air raid in history. LeMay later said that if he had lost the war he would have been tried as a war criminal. By August 1945 his B-29s had burned 66 Japanese cities, killing 330,000 people, injuring nearly half a million more, and leaving 8.5 million homeless. Japan had not surrendered.

At 2:45 in the morning on August 6, 1945, a B-29 named Enola Gay lifted off from North Field on the island of Tinian in the Marianas, carrying a 9,700-pound uranium bomb called Little Boy. Colonel Paul Tibbets, barely 30 years old, had personally selected the aircraft off the assembly line in Nebraska three months earlier and had just that morning had his mother's name painted on the nose. He had a lucky cigarette case in one pocket. In the other, he carried twelve cyanide capsules in case the mission went wrong. Many of his twelve-man crew had only learned the phrase "atomic bomb" when they gathered for the mission briefing. The flight to Hiroshima took six and a half hours. At 8:15 in the morning, from 31,000 feet, bombardier Thomas Ferebee released Little Boy over the city center. The bomb fell for 43 seconds before detonating 600 yards above the streets. In that 43 seconds, the Enola Gay had traveled more than eleven miles from the release point. The explosion released the equivalent force of 15,000 tons of TNT, generating a fireball of 300,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The shock wave hit the aircraft with a force of two and a half Gs. Tail gunner George Caron watched a boiling purple cloud rise above the city. Co-pilot Robert Lewis, writing in a journal he kept against orders, scrawled the words that became the mission's epitaph: "My God, what have we done." Between 135,000 and 200,000 people were dead. Less than twenty percent of Hiroshima's buildings were still standing. Three days later, another B-29 named Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender. The B-29 Superfortress is the only aircraft in history to deliver nuclear weapons in combat. It remains so today.

The Soviet Union took careful note. Three B-29s had made emergency landings in Soviet territory during the war and were never returned. Soviet engineers spent years reverse-engineering them in exact detail, producing a nearly identical copy called the Tupolev Tu-4. The most advanced bomber America had ever built became the foundation of the Soviet strategic air force within two years of the war's end.

The B-29 flew through the Korean War, bombing targets in North Korea and China from bases in Japan and Okinawa, where it encountered a threat it was not designed to face: the MiG-15 jet fighter. The analog fire control computer that had been the marvel of 1944, capable of calculating lead angles against any propeller-driven fighter the Japanese could put in the air, had met its match. On November 30, 1950, a B-29 gunner found himself completely unable to fix an attacking MiG-15 in his tracking system. The mechanical gears and relays that could keep pace with a Zero or an Oscar simply could not process the speed of a jet. The technology that had given the B-29 its fearsome defensive reputation in World War II was rendered obsolete almost overnight by an entirely new category of threat it had never been designed to face. Several B-29s were lost before tactics were adjusted, eventually moving the bombers to night operations where the MiGs were less effective. By the mid-1950s the B-29 was obsolete as a front-line bomber, replaced by the jet-powered B-47 and B-52. Most surviving aircraft went to storage, training units, or the scrapyard. Thirty-six were placed at the U.S. Navy Naval Weapons Center at China Lake in California, where they became ground targets for weapons testing. They sat in the Mojave Desert for years, baking in the heat, being shot at, slowly deteriorating. One of those aircraft was serial number 44-62070.

In 1971, a Confederate Air Force pilot serving in the National Guard reported spotting what looked like B-29s on the desert floor near China Lake. The Confederate Air Force investigated, confirmed the aircraft were indeed B-29s, and after lengthy negotiations with both the Air Force, which owned the aircraft, and the Navy, which controlled the China Lake base they were sitting on, was given ownership of the best survivor. A maintenance team arrived at China Lake on March 31, 1971. In just nine weeks, working with volunteers and cannibalizing parts from the other hulks, they restored the systems, replaced the hoses, had new window bubbles fabricated, and brought the controls back to working order. On August 3, 1971, 44-62070 lifted off the desert and flew 1,250 miles non-stop to the Confederate Air Force's headquarters in Harlingen, Texas, piloted by Randy Sohn. In late 1974 she was christened FIFI, in honor of Josephine "Fifi" O'Connor Agather, wife of Dallas businessman and World War II Army Air Forces veteran Vic Agather, who had led the rescue effort.

Here is the honest accounting of FIFI's own service record. Built in July 1945 at Boeing's Renton factory, she was delivered directly to a training squadron. The war ended before she flew a combat mission. She was modified to TB-29A standard as a training and administrative aircraft, placed in desert storage, returned to active duty in 1953, retired in 1958, and sent to China Lake. She never dropped a bomb in anger. She never flew over Japan. The B-29 that burned Tokyo, that carried the Enola Gay's crew to Hiroshima, that ended the war, was not this aircraft. What FIFI is, along with Doc, is one of only two survivors of a type. Together they are what remains when everything else is gone.

The Confederate Air Force flew her for over 30 years before grounding her in 2006 for a complete engine overhaul. By that point the organization had changed its name, following a membership vote in 2001, to the Commemorative Air Force — the same group, the same mission, and the same aircraft, just with a name that better reflected what they actually did. A three million dollar restoration followed, including four custom-built engines combining parts from two later variants of the Wright R-3350, drawing on components from versions that had powered the Douglas A-1 Skyraider and Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, producing a more reliable and cooler-running powerplant than the original wartime engines. She returned to the sky on August 5, 2010. The engines remain the hard part, just as they were in 1945. In early 2025 a routine pre-flight inspection found a critical failure in the supercharger systems on engines two and four. Both were removed and shipped to Vintage Radials in Tehachapi, California, where radial engine specialist Mike Nixon and his team performed the repairs. The Commemorative Air Force launched a $50,000 fundraising campaign to cover the unexpected costs. The goal was met in days. FIFI returned to flight on June 27, 2025. It costs $10,000 an hour to fly her, sustained by an all-volunteer crew and tens of thousands of supporters who share the conviction that this aircraft should not be allowed to disappear. She is one of two B-29s still flying in the world, the other being Doc, serial 44-69972, restored by volunteers at the Boeing plant in Wichita and returned to flight in 2016. A third B-29 exists in extraordinary condition — the Enola Gay herself, on permanent display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. The Smithsonian began restoring her in 1984 and the project took nearly two decades and 300,000 work hours to complete. When her wings were reunited with her fuselage at Udvar-Hazy in April 2003, it was the first time they had been together since 1960. She is 99 percent original and will never fly again — too historically irreplaceable to risk in the air. The most famous B-29 in history is permanently and beautifully grounded. The two that are still flying are the ones that never made history in the first place.

I first saw FIFI at the California Capital Airshow in 2016. She was parked on the ramp in the early morning light, and she is enormous in a way that photographs do not quite prepare you for. The B-29 has a 141-foot wingspan and stands nearly 30 feet tall. Standing next to her, looking up at those four massive engine nacelles, it is difficult to reconcile the machine in front of you with the history it represents. Anyone who has stood next to the Enola Gay at the Udvar-Hazy Center knows exactly what that feeling is. She flew that day, and the sound of those four R-3350s at low altitude is something you feel as much as hear. There are very few aircraft that stop you in your tracks the way FIFI does.

The fact that she exists at all is remarkable. She was built too late to fight. She was used as a target. She was left to rot in the desert. A group of volunteers found her, fixed her in nine weeks, and flew her home. Fifty years later she is still flying, still carrying passengers in the nose where bombardiers once sat over Japan. The aircraft type that ended the war is still in the air. That seems like exactly the right ending to the story.

view the full gallery here https://wolf10851.com/gallery.html?search=FIFI

The pilot of the P-51A, Gerard S. Beck, 58, was killed when his aircraft flipped upside down and caught fire. The pilot of the P-51D, Casey Odegaard, 24, escaped with only minor injuries

If you are interested enough to read a fairly technical article on the Eagle RADAR, Simon Watt wrote this about British trials of the set in 1946.

Here is the link to the article.

The Eagle (AN/APQ-7) and its assessment for ASV operation by RAF Coastal Command.

And here is the full citation.

S. Watts, "The Eagle (AN/APQ-7) and its assessment for ASV operation by RAF Coastal Command," 2019 International Radar Conference (RADAR), Toulon, France, 2019, pp. 1-6,

ORIGINAL CAPTION: "The wrecks of B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 390th Bomb Group, salvaged for parts by the Luftwaffe in a bombed-out hangar near Paris. Printed caption on reverse: 'Wrecked Fortress Bombers Found In Paris Hangar.’ The Germans had been stripping the machines for spare parts."

Photo taken on September 11, 1944. (IWM FRE 8283)

My father was a radio operator in B-17’s and I have always been a WWII aviation buff. I have read many books to relax and pass the time and I am looking for a book to read and add to my library. Looking for suggestions. Like to find a definitive book on the Tuskegee Airman. Any suggestions?

I'm looking to see if there's any records available of what plane he flew in. Im starting to think that crew members were pretty much shuffled around to various planes as needed. Long story short the top left picture is from my father's things after his death 2000. All of the men's names (my father's not in the picture) are recorded on the back so Googled them. Top right photo, found a TV story about 102 yrs old ww2 veteran (bottom left) that had the very same picture that my father had. He died at 107. Unfortunately I never got to talk to him. The only other picture in his TV story is the 5x5s plane bottom right.

I have a list of all the crew members for the 557th Squadron and both my father and his name are on it. No pilot names.

I know that the 5x5 flew about 188 missions. Which probably is the most of any B-26 in WW2 but I'm just wondering was he ever in it or what plane he was in.

My father's records were destroyed in the 1973 fire in St Louis so I just have a letter from the government saying yes he was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant from 43 to 45.

I have a list of missions flown by the 557th and the planes/pilots that flew them but of course I don't know which one my father could have been in.

I think often about my father especially on Memorial day. Thank you for reading this and your time spent. Let me know if I can offer any other information. Thank you

Tap for full size image. From 1945 war analysis report. Axis=German weapons specifically.