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We have people saying that it shouldn’t be displayed at all because it would be a celebration.” We get people saying that we’re hiding the aircraft. We have gotten surprising and contradictory responses about it. “People have very strong feelings about this plane because of the sensitivity about nuclear warfare. Neufeld, a museum curator specializing in World War II-era aircraft. “We looked at the subject for some years,” said Michael J. The plane’s 132-foot wingspan created a huge problem for a museum already packed with priceless civilian and military aircraft and space vehicles. The decision to put the bomber in the spotlight at the Air and Space Museum was not easily made. They have included Tibbets and Japanese survivors of the bombing nearly half a century ago. Garber facility-where other historically important planes await restoration-the fuselage attracts a steady stream of visitors who make their way out to this Washington suburb. Stored in a dim, unheated hangar at the Smithsonian’s Paul E. 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. “Our objective,” said Bernie Poppert, a onetime 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.” Five years after that blinding flash, the weapon was estimated to have caused 200,000 fatalities.įor nearly a decade now, technicians have been at work restoring the bomber, perhaps the most famed artifact of World War II, to mint condition. The next day, the 30-year-old colonel and the airplane he named for his mother became one of the significant and enduringly controversial figures in the history of warfare: They dropped the first atomic bomb.
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Shortly thereafter, a young Army Air Corps enlisted man, pulled away from a softball game, carefully inscribed the name “Enola Gay” in foot-high letters beneath the pilot’s window. 5, 1945, after the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima was loaded in the bomb bay of B-29 Superfortress No.