“It was from the Enola Gay,” his father said, and he had come into possession of it not long after the war ended. Rich knew his father had never flown a B-29 - in World War II, he had been a navigator on a C-46 cargo plane flying the Burma Hump - and so he asked what was so special about the piece. It bore no description, but was protected like a relic or talisman. We didn’t know what it was.” At some point it resurfaced in a shadow box along with various wings his father had saved from years in the Air Force. First, she called her father to see if he would be willing to do that - he had a momentary misgiving, but then decided to reveal the family history, joking, “They can’t court-martial my father 20 years after he died.” Like Katie, her father had been aware of the object throughout his childhood, noticing it disappearing and reappearing in various drawers and bookshelves. (A later Smithsonian news release confirmed the piece was missing.)Īnd how did the Rich family come by such an artifact? Talk to my dad, Katie said. But she went online and found photos of the cockpit before restoration and, sure enough, the cap to the pilot’s wheel was empty. Her grandfather, she was told, had removed the cap more than a half-century earlier. Her father, Robert John Rich Jr., explained that it was the center of the steering wheel from the Enola Gay. She had been vaguely aware of its presence all her life, but now was curious enough to ask what it was. Two summers earlier she had asked her father about a small object in a shadow box that had “B-29” and “Boeing” on it. At the end of the long table, Katie Rich, a senior philosophy major, seemed particularly engaged, but said little.Īfter class she came up to me and said that her father had a piece of the Enola Gay. I spoke of my time in Hiroshima on assignment for National Geographic and of my interviews with the hibakusha - survivors of the bomb. Recently, I sat before my class at Boston College discussing John Hersey’s influential book “Hiroshima,” as part of a course that looks at stories that changed history. What became of the original cap? It seemed destined to be forever lost. The restorers scoured the country, tapping into a network of collectors and aircraft aficionados to locate a vintage replacement. The cap, a stylish black affair with “B-29” and “Boeing” written to form the wings of a silhouetted bomber, was gone. But among the missing pieces was the cap that snapped into the control wheel where the pilot, Col.
Where is the enola gay airplane now skin#
Workers invested an estimated 300,000 hours on the task, sorting through countless parts and polishing its aluminum skin until the iconic B-29 Superfortress - one of the most famous planes in the world - once more took shape. Over the years it had been disassembled, spread across multiple buildings, birds had nested in its engines, a turret had been smashed, its wheels had decayed, and its parts were corroded from being left out in the wind, sun and rain.
In the 1980s, the Smithsonian began restoring the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Credit National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution