Cool.  I was at the Smithsonian Air and Space in like, 1997 or 98 when just the Enola Gay forward fuselage was on display.  5-6 years ago I got to the Udvar-Hazy and got to see the whole thing. I don't know the history, you might, but it's pretty crazy it took so long to get Enola Gay restored considering Bockscar has been on display in Dayton since the 1960s.

ETA: Curious; the guys that got Doc flying keep saying it's the "last" B-29 capable of being restored to
flying condition.  How close would you say Enola Gay is to being able to
Fly?

As I recall,

Sat in military storage.  

Got pulled out of storage and was ferried to Andrews.

Sat at Andrews.

Got pulled apart (wing in four sections, fuselage in two sections) and trucked to Garber.

Sat in storage at Garber.

Eventually went through a very long restoration (assemblies were pulled out of storage, restored, then put back in storage).

Was finally assembled at Udvar-Hazy (first time the museum had a large enough indoor space to assemble the entire plane).

When I was working on the right main gear, somebody else was working on an outboard wing section just down from me, and a couple other people were working on the right inboard wing section on the other side of the shop.  There was also a Hawker Hurricane fuselage being worked on, a Japanese Aichi Seiran restoration, and a few smaller restoration and repair projects.  During staff meetings, there were concerns voiced about some of the WW2 stuff that needed to at least have some work done to stop corrosion from destroying them while in storage.  It's a huge collection, with a seemingly never ending supply of restoration work.

They could have put everything else on hold and worked on nothing but the Enola Gay, but then it would have still sat in storage, in pieces, until a suitable display space became available, and all those smaller planes would have continued to corrode in storage.

Could it be restored to flyable condition?  Yes, but you would have to go through the entire plane, again.

There are essentially three types of restoration:

Restore to flying.

Restore as a show plane.

Restore for museum display.

Restore to flying is the simplest of the three.  You just go through everything and make it airworthy.

Show plane restoration gets more involved.  You have to make everything airworthy, but there is more detail work and you have to do some research to make sure you aren't changing something from it's original condition for no reason (I've heard of show judges taking a dim view on Phillips head screws being used on a plane that was built when slotted screws were used in it's production).

Then there's museum display restoration.  You want to keep the plane as original as possible.  A piece of skin may have some corrosion on the inside, and a decision has to be made whether to replace that section of skin (which would require finding out exactly what material was originally used and obtaining some) or remove the skin, remove the corrosion and treat the material to prevent any further corrosion, and reinstall the skin.  Airworthiness is not a factor, because the museum has no intention to fly it.  On my first day at Garber, I was helping rivet a section of skin back onto the Enola Gay's vertical stabilizer, after somebody else had removed it and treated some corrosion.  The landing gear struts on the Enola Gay cannot collapse, because instead of filling them with oil and a nitrogen charge, the insides were coated with a preservative grease and a precisely cut, round block of wood inserted to hold the strut at the desired height.  

The entire restoration would have to be redone, with the airworthiness factor being put back into the decision process, and the "keep it original" factor taking a lower priority.


ETA:  I guess you could count restomods and say there are four types of restoration, but I consider that to be more refurbish, than restore, if that makes any sense.

I've done three out of the four, but one of my 'restore to flying' jobs ended up winning 'most original classic aircraft' at a show, so I guess I could say I've done four of the four, depending on how you look at it.  

It was my first job after Garber, and I would occasionally work late, off the clock, doing some detail jobs similar to how I had done things at Garber.  One of my bosses found me doing that, one night, and gave me some grief over spending so much time taking map lights apart and restoring them, when I could be working on the airframe.  At one point he raised his voice and said we were restoring it to fly, not to be a show plane.  I pointed out that I was off the clock, and since I wasn't using any new parts (no cost to them) in what I was doing, I'd do it the way I wanted to, and if he wanted me to work on the airframe, he needed to get me the parts I had already asked for.

He was the one that ended up taking the plane to the show.  Last I heard, he has the award in his office.

I might get made fun of for it, but I totally want to fly this!

Hey I'd like to see one fly!

you fly it, I'll watch 

Have we mentioned the Gee Bee Racer?

This is the Aichi M6A.  Why is it unusual?  It was designed to be launched from Japan's WWII submarine aircraft carrier.  



Both the submarine and the airplane were really built, too.

You wanna see a "back lot," check out Davis-Monthan!



link

Rockwell-MBB X-31

Pretty aircraft!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD9NW6GckU8

I don't know about Udvar-Hazy, but when the restoration shop was still a Garber, they did a few guided tours each day.  As I recall, people could check at the Air & Space Museum in DC to see if there were any open slots in the tour groups and sign up.

Original goal was to bomb the locks of the Panama Canal, but by the time they were ready to use, the war had gotten much worse for Japan and they were sent on a mission to attack a naval base closer to Japan.  If my memory isn't off, three subs had been completed, but they didn't quite have enough planes to fill each sub, and the war ended before the subs could launch the planes.

http://retroplane.net/forum/files/plank7602_014_191.pdf

Al Backstrom was a friend of mine. He was also an admirer of the Horten Brothers that designed early flying wing designs for the Luftwaffe in WWII. Al and Van dabbled with several tailless designs.

In the 1970's and 80"s when I was building homebuilt airplanes and restoring my Beech 18 we would visit on a daily basis. Al's office was in the same row of hangars that mine was in.

Al repeatedly asked/offered me the opportunity to fly this airplane. It was plagued with partial power failures and I shied away from it. Finally he got it running somewhat consistently and I flew it once.

It had some unique handling characteristics. The yaw control was from spoilers mounted on the outboard sides of the tip/vertical fins. Partial opening didn't do much and just a tiny bit more would yield a big response.

Kinda like the moped/fat girl thing...

MacCready Gossamer Albatross- Human powered aircraft that crossed the English Channel in 1979

Human-powered helicopter!

AWESOME!  Thanks for posting that.

That was 2013.  How in the world was I unaware of human-powered rotary-wing flight?

Is there room for little-known spacecraft?

Little Joe I-- Mercury test rocket, testing escape tower and other components



Little Joe II-- testing Apollo escape tower



In the one Little Joe II flight, which was to have resulted in a launch by the escape tower-- The rocket failed before reaching the planned test altitude. The escape tower worked as planned, "rescuing" the boilerplate Apollo Command Module.
eta I included these 'cause 'Murica!

Today, Dec 7, it should be noted that George Welch, test pilot of the F86 was one of the few Air Corps pilots to get into the fight during the attack on Pearl Harbor (along with his wingman Ken Taylor)

How about a CASA 235?



Not particularly fast, but it had the aft ramp which made loading and dropping lots of fun.  Got to fly this actual airplane in Afghanistan.  Sure do miss it.

ka

My dad and I did this when I was either 10 or 12.  Had to have been around 96/97.  We got off the metro rail a little early and got some strange looks. We eventually made it and I was in awe of everything there. I remember seeing a helicopter with jet engines on the blades, The nose section of Enola gay was not there. I think they were fixing the section just behind it. Tour guide told us they found bomb armong pins behind a console.  The japanese sea plane was also being restored . I have a pic somewhere of me standing in front of a B36 wheel that was leaning on an exit door of one of the buildings in a crate.  Alo I remember a Japanese either Me262 type or V1 witha cockpit.  Also saw a float plane similar to a pby. Maybe a curtiss?   In all it was an awesome time. Ended up catching a ride with a sailor on leave back to the hotel too so we would t have to get on the metro again

Googling that tail number is... interesting.

Attached File

My father flew them in the USNR. Described them as a total hunk of shit.

Short Mayo Composite.

A design to provide non-stop mail service back when aircraft range was less than ocean widths.

Attached File

That looks like something Jeremy Clarkson would build.

The Brits were trying to tie the Empire together, but really lacked the ass to do it, so they cobbled a bunch of stuff together. So, in that, your observation is quite trenchant.

The reality is that Brits could invent all sorts of stuff, but they couldn't effectively manufacture it, and when they did, the design specifications were usually not optimized correctly, and if they managed the first two, their passive aggressive back-stabbing between and among the government, manufacturers and operators ensured it took far to long to get the greatly compromised finished product out at the speed of the market.

That's how the Brits went from first to among the worst in aircraft design and manufacturing. Now, there is nearly nothing left.

The Nakajima Kikka was similar to the Me262, and was a result of the Germans sharing technology with the Japanese.  It started flight tests shortly before the war ended.  One was hanging from the ceiling in one of the storage buildings at Garber, in 1993.

During the period when the Japanese got desperate and started kamikaze attacks on allied ships, they had a rocket propelled bomb with short wings and tail surfaces, which was dropped from a large twin engine bomber and functioned similar to a modern cruise missile.  The guidance system was a pilot in a small cockpit that was behind the warhead.  The US referred to it as the "Baka Bomb" during the war.  Fuzzy memory tells me that the Japanese name for it was "Oka", but I may be off on that.  As I recall, one was hanging from the ceiling in the restoration shop at Garber, in 1993.

A lot of men died in those planes at Russian and Chinese hands.

doesn't the coast guard fly those?

with nothing but hammers.

I didn't see anyone post one of these:

I actually saw one of these come through MFE way back in the day. Custer Channel Wing

Another "rare bird" was the  developed by "Pops" Johnson. It was the last of Pops' designs which started with the Johnson Rocket 185.  A prototype for the "Johnson Rocket 260" sat on our ramp at Upper Valley Aviation in the mid 1950's for a while.  My brother and I used to play on it. I couldn't remember what happened to it till I got to searching. First flight was in April 1951 at the Rusk County Airport in Henderson, Texas.[4] Over the next three years, Regent Aircraft moved successively to Pearland, Edinburg and finally McAllen, Texas. Installation of a 400 hp Lycoming engine was proposed but never accomplished. An unfinished airframe was behind the hangar of Upper Valley Aviation in McAllen for many years and was reported to have later gone to Minnesota. The flying prototype was destroyed by fire in the 1960s after a forced landing on a highway in New Mexico by the current owner, Dick Carroll, following an engine failure.

Curtiss pusher:

What is that?

iranian modified northrop f-5f.

I still call B.S. since what I can find on the web has the Iranians both claiming it's an indigenous airplane and claiming it is on par with the F-18.  If they have it at all it's probably worse than an F-5.

You haven't seen their amazing stealth flying boats, huh?

...

there are pictures and videos of it flying and the photo i posted is legit.

Oh, I believe you.  I'm calling B.S. on the Iranians and their claims now.

PA48 Enforcers. Piper's armed turbine variant to the Cavalier Mustang

that exhaust is huge.

they modified existing aircraft that we sold them.  they bought f-5 variants from 1965 into 1976.