![enola gay pilot controversy enola gay pilot controversy](https://assets-myneworleans-com.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/2021/12/Enola.jpg)
They were also the first successful large-scale use of pressurised crew compartments.
![enola gay pilot controversy enola gay pilot controversy](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/08/c7300f17-6463-4ee3-813f-34b5a4b277e7822d2861e3a142c5b4c709376352c947.jpeg)
The planes were fitted with special engines, propellers and faster-acting bomb bay doors. The museum has spent more than 300,000 staff hours restoring the plane, which was one of 15 B-29s modified specifically for the secret atomic bomb missions. With a wingspan of 43 metres and a gross weight of 62,370 kilograms, the Enola Gay was too large and heavy to be housed at the museum's flagship building on the National Mall. "We need to remind ourselves about how terrible nuclear weapons are." "I have no objections to the Enola Gay being reassembled but to see an aircraft without the story behind it is a waste of time," Herzig said. However, Japanese-American researcher Aiko Herzig said she had hoped scenes of the human impact could have been included. "We believe that it is historically accurate this time and we congratulate the Air and Space Museum," said Napoleon Byars of the association. The Air Force Association, which took up the cause a decade ago for veterans, said it approved of the new exhibit. "They can come up with what it means to them. "Our role is to provide, artifact and restore as best we can and allow people to come to see it and let it speak to them," he said. Mr Daso told Reuters that death toll estimates varied widely and the exhibition space did not lend itself to a complicated display including details of the human cost. The current text for the Enola Gay exhibit does not include casualty figures from Hiroshima or show any photographs of the devastation the bomb caused. Nearly a decade ago, an exhibit in Washington about the atomic bomb and the Enola Gay - named after the pilot's mother - was met with a storm of controversy because many US veterans felt the Japanese were cast as victims of US aggression.Ī smaller, less interpretive exhibit finally opened several months later. The Enola Gay was then used as the advance weather reconnaissance aircraft for the follow-up attack on Nagasaki that killed 70,000 people. The bombing was carried out on a sunny day at 8:15am from an altitude of 31,600 feet. The pneumatic doors to the "bomb bay" that once held the atomic weapon were swung open for television cameras.īut Mr Daso said a decision had not been made on whether to leave them open when the plane goes on public view. The Enola Gay unleashed an atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy", on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima, killing more than 140,000 people and leaving tens of thousands disfigured and suffering from lingering radiation illness. "First Atomic Bomb, Hiroshima, August 6, 1945," are written on the side of the shiny aircraft, with its transparent cockpit nose and defensive machine guns strutting out of the tail. "This airplane is a part of our history and it is a part of who we are," said Dik Daso, curator of the aeronautics division of the museum.
![enola gay pilot controversy enola gay pilot controversy](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200414120630-enola-gay-4.jpg)
The reassembled B-29 Superfortress was unveiled to the media yesterday in a hangar near Dulles International Airport at the museum's new annex, which opens on December 15. It carried the most destructive weapon of World War Two and now the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, is going on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.