Today FIFI is again a barnstorming warbird.Įach of FIFI’s engines is named for a Hollywood actress: Betty (Grable), Rita (Hayworth), Ingrid (Bergman), and Mitzi (Gaynor). After several years of “warbird barnstorming” for the CAF, the plane was grounded for four years for another restoration that included replacing all four engines. Then came the thorough restoration, lasting three years. That day it rose from the desert and flew 1,250 miles to Harlingen, Texas (then home of the CAF). New parts were fabricated, other B-29s at China Lake were cannibalized for old parts. On Maa CAF maintenance team began a rudimentary restoration of the plane-just enough to get it into the air. The CAF, overcoming much government red tape, acquired the airplane for $1. The airplane, parked in the desert for seventeen years, also had suffered from heat, sand, and vandalism. The airplane was one of thirty-six Superfortresses that had been used for gunnery targets. The Commemorative Air Force acquired the B-29 in 1971 after a group of CAF members found the old bomber at the million-acre Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake in the Mojave Desert in California. In the 1960s he was an early member of the Commemorative Air Force and was instrumental in finding, rescuing, and financing restoration of FIFI.Īnd the name FIFI? Agather named the plane for his wife Josephine. During World War II Vic Agather had been a member of the B-29 development team of the Army Air Forces. That big A on FIFI’s tail? Stands for “Agather.” And that’s where FIFI’s resurrection from sand and obscurity began. YouTube video of FIFI landing on Monday (the slow-propeller illusion is caused by near-synchronization of the propeller speed and the camera’s frame rate): People within hearing distance of the four propellers stopped what they were doing and walked toward the high chain link security fence that encloses the airport.Īs she landed and began her taxi down the mile-long runway, heat off the concrete of the runway shimmered like heat off the desert where this aluminum phoenix had languished for seventeen years before her rebirth. Returning to Texas to catch her breath overnight between airshows, FIFI came in over Blue Mound, then Saginaw, still a speck in the sky, banked south over Sansom Park and approached Meacham Field’s runway 34 from the south, catching the sun on her wings as she turned. On Monday that Superfortress flew into town from out of the past. Today, to the Federal Aviation Administration she’s airplane N529B to the Commemorative Air Force aircraft preservation society she’s FIFI.īut by whatever name you call her, she’s “the world’s only flying B-29 Superfortress.”
B29 ENOLA GAY HANGAR INSIDE SERIAL NUMBER
In 1944, to the aircraft company that built her and to the Army Air Forces that flew her, she was serial number 44-62070. He had heard her before anyone saw her, heard the distinctive drone of a four-propeller heavy bomber, a drone that was heard countless times during World War II by friend and foe alike-but with very different reactions. “She’s here,” he called out, his voice reverberating in the cavernous hangar. A volunteer working in the hangar of the Vintage Flying Museum at Meacham Field paused, cocked his head, and listened.