| Enola Gay | |
|---|---|
 Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay's cockpit before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 | |
| General information | |
| Type | B-29-45-MO Superfortress |
| Manufacturer | Glenn L. Martin Company, Omaha, Nebraska |
| Owners | United States Army Air Forces |
| Serial | 44-86292 |
| Radio code | Victor 12 (later changed to Victor 82) |
| History | |
| Manufactured | 18 May 1945 |
| In service | 18 May 1945 – 24 July 1946 |
| Preserved at | National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center |
The Enola Gay (/əˈnoʊlə/) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and destroyed about three-quarters of the city. Enola Gay participated in the second nuclear attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki, a secondary target, 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 its 1961 disassembly and storage at a Smithsonian facility in Suitland, Maryland.
In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93.