Enola Gay

Enola Gay
Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay's cockpit to get reporters to stand clear of the propellers prior to engine start, before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima
Type	B-29-45-MO Superfortress
Manufacturer	Glenn L. Martin Company, Omaha, Nebraska
Manufactured	18 May 1945
Serial	44-86292
Radio code	Victor 12 (later changed to victor 82)
Owners and operators	United States Army Air Forces
In service	18 May 1945 – 24 July 1946
Preserved at	National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center

The Enola Gay (pronunciation: /ᵻˈnoʊlə ˈɡeɪ/) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.

After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961.

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