In that brief time, Tibbets had to get the Enola Gay to a slant range of at least eight miles from the. Enola Gay is the world-famous nickname of the B-29 aircraft who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 (mother of the pilot, Paul Tibbets, was Enola Gay Tibbets), while Dakota. He relayed the news of the atomic bomb to his superiors in code, who forwarded it to President Truman. (To conserve fuel and aircraft, the Japanese had decided not to intercept small formations of enemy aircraft.) The device reached its detonation altitude of 1,890 feet agl in 83 seconds. Richard Nelson was the youngest of the Enola Gay crew. Stored in a dim, unheated hangar at the Smithsonian's Paul E. None of the aircraft encountered any defensive action. The compartment where Tibbets and his crew guided the mission to Hiroshima now looks as it did when the new plane was turned over to the 509th Composite Bomb Group in 1945. The Enola Gay exhibit finally opens today for public viewing at the National Air and Space Museum. Mechanics have taken the huge engines apart, removed and restored the wings and landing gear and refurbished the cockpit, bomb bay and 50-caliber machine guns in the tail. Captain Robert Lewis co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the. The restoration, one of the most extensive such projects ever undertaken, is nearly complete. In August 1945, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and. They have decided that 50 years after the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy" on Japan, the plane will be put on display in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. "Our objective," said Bernie Poppert, a one-time aircraft mechanic who has been one of the leaders of the effort, "is to preserve the history of the technology, so people can look at it 250 years from now and see exactly how it was done."īut for even longer than technicians have worked to preserve the plane, officials have debated what should be done with it. the enola gay b-29 superfortress dropping little boy atomic bomb over hiroshima during world war ii. For nearly a decade now, technicians have been at work restoring the bomber, perhaps the most famed artifact of World War II, to mint condition.