![]() That’s with tour costs including 400 gallons of gasoline and with an all-volunteer crew of six: a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer plus left, right, and aft scanners to eye the wing flaps and so forth and help ensure everything is running right. “FIFI” costs the CAF $10,000 an hour to operate, tour manager Don Boccaccio said. Passengers are allowed to crawl back and forth along the tube connecting the B-29’s fore and aft crew areas. Tickets for an hour’s ride range from $1,595 for the bombardier’s seat in the nose-where Klotz sat-to $570 for seats in the rear fuselage. Here are the remaining images from a total of 53 detail photos of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress 'FIFI operated by the CAF. It was one of the last made and never flew in active service. Salvaged from the “boneyard” at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., “FIFI” is one of only two “airworthy” B-29s, according to the CAF’s cockpit tour guides. ![]() The B-29/B-24 Squadron is one of numerous CAF groups that sell rides on old military aircraft, large and small, and open them up for tours as static displays. Klotz visited on the last day of the Commemorative Air Force’s AirPower History Tour stop at Rocky Mountain. He turned down a cockpit tour, satisfied, as the tour manager confirmed is often the case when past crew members turn up, to observe from a short distance the activities of getting the old bomber-the same type as the war-ending Enola Gay-up in the air. Used by many Allied air forces, the B-25 served in every theater of World War II, and after the war ended, many remained in service, operating across four decades. 29 by his son to see “FIFI,” a Boeing B-29 Superfortress like the ones Klotz flew in during the war.īased out of Saipan in the Pacific, the B-29 bombardier with the 73rd Wing, 500th Bomb Group, 28th Squadron didn’t keep track of how many missions he flew seated in the glass nose of the cockpit, taking aim with the aircraft’s famed Norden Bombsight. The North American B-25 Mitchell is an American medium bomber that was introduced in 1941 and named in honor of Brigadier General William 'Billy' Mitchell, a pioneer of U.S. used by the Army Air Forces Motion Picture Unit for training films on the B-29. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1945, was brought out to the flight line at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, Colo., near Denver on Aug. This is the forward pressure compartment, or cockpit, of a Boeing B-29. On the eve of the end of one war, a World War II bombardier relived a little of the last day of his own conflict leading up to its anniversary Sept. This article was originally published Sept.
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