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It was only five minutes later that the Enola Gay arrived over the target at an altitude of 9,470 m. Control of the mission at this point was now handed over to the aircrafts bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee who would aim and release the bomb. At 8.10am the crew of the Enola Gay lined up for their bombing run and Colonel Tibbets switched over to the onboard autopilot. The target was the T-shaped Aoio bridge in the central business district of Hiroshima. Two hundred miles away flying over the Pacific, the Enola Gay had the prime target confirmed. To them, August 6 would be just another day. Advice: Bomb Primary.” On the ground an all-clear siren was sounded ten minutes later and soon the people of Hiroshima once again continued to go about their lives, walking to school, eating breakfast, opening their stores, catching their tram to work. “Cloud cover less than 3/10th at all altitudes. The aircraft called Straight Flush sent through a radio message, which was picked up by Enola Gay. High over the city of Hiroshima at around 7am, one of the mission support aircraft flew a reconnaissance course and an air raid siren rang out around the city. For example, if the city was too overcast or too windy that morning, the bomb might have fallen on Yokohama, Niigata or Kokura, which were deemed the alternate mission targets. Though the prime target was Hiroshima in the early hours of August 6, 1945, the first operational atomic bomb used in warfare could have ended up elsewhere. They had onboard “the gadget”, a single bomb ordinance called “Little Boy”, yet they had up to three other possible alternate targets. What many people don’t realise is that even at that midway point in the mission, the flight crew of the Enola Gay did not yet know exactly where the target was going to be. From Iwo Jima, the Enola Gay and its two support aircraft veered eastward towards the island of Honshu and increased their cruising altitude to 9,500 m and settled into a sustained speed of around 200 knots.
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Three other supporting B-29s had left Tinian an hour earlier to conduct weather reconnaissance over the selected targets on the Japanese mainland. 35 was rising into the inky blackness of the northern Pacific skies on an initial flight path to Iwo Jima where it rendezvoused with mission support aircraft whose primary role would be to document what happens over the next few hours on film and through scientific telemetry. Thirty seconds later USAF Operations Order No. It took every ounce of horsepower, every metre of tarmac to get the 60,000 kg aircraft airborne. The Enola Gay was 7,500 kilograms overweight due to the heavy fuel load and the weight of its onboard ordinance that morning.
#CREW OF THE ENOLA GAY FULL#
At the controls Tibbets and his co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis carefully built the four Wright R-3350 engines to the roar of full power, released brakes and slowly began to lumber down the 2,500-metre runway. When the huge bomber named ‘Enola Gay’ after Tibbets’s mother, reached the end of the runway it turned 90 degrees and was pointed in the direction of the Japanese islands some six hours’ flight time away.
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Udvar-Hazy Center in December 2003.“It took every ounce of horsepower, every metre of tarmac to get the 60,000 kg aircraft airborne.”Īt approximately 2.45am on AugUSAF pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets, taxied the silver Boeing B-29 Superfortress towards the end of the floodlit runway ‘A’ at North Field, Tinian Island in the Mariana’s. While this exhibit is now closed, Museum specialists continued to restore the remaining components of the airplane, and after an additional nine years the fully assembled Enola Gay went on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. The exhibition text summarized the history and development of the Boeing B-29 fleet used in bombing raids against Japan.Īnother portion of the exhibit detailed the painstaking efforts of Smithsonian aircraft restoration specialists who had spent more than a decade restoring parts of the Enola Gay for this exhibition. The components on display included two engines, the vertical stabilizer, an aileron, propellers, and the forward fuselage that contains the bomb bay.Ī video presentation about the Enola Gay's mission included interviews with the crew before and after the mission including mission pilot Col. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender.