My son and I were driving along in Birmingham on Saturday and darned if a B-29 didn't fly over. Which is something that you notice.

Turns out the only flying B-29 FIFI is on tour.

http://www.airpowersquadron.org/

My kids were actually interested in the plane; they let you climb up through the bomb bay and up into the cockpit. They also have rides on FIFI and a few other warbirds.

Highly recommended and it's only $20 entrance cost for the whole family.

That would be interesting to climb into.
I once climbed into a B-36 - adding a B-29 would be cool.

I remember climbing into that plane several years ago. I had heard they were doing another restoration on it a few years back.

The last I checked "Fifi" is supposed to be at the WWII Weekend in Reading, PA next weekend (June 7,8,9). I saw her two years ago and it was the first B-29 I ever saw. She was impressive to see and hear her engines turn over before takeoff.

Crawl through a bomb bay to a cockpit in a B-17, B-24 or B-29 and you'll get a good idea as to how small crew members were back in the 1940s. Maybe 5-6 and 140 lb.

We've grown a bit over 70 years.

My cousin, Ron, fairly recently deceased, was a radio operator on a B-29 based in Japan during the Korean War. He told me the story several times of how they were shot down on the way home after providing support for the Marines. They were losing altitude rapidly and the Captain (some type of Scottish name I can't recall, but Ron, my cousin, said he was a re-up from WWII and had over 10,000 hours) came on the radio and said, something to the effect, "Well boys, we can't make it back to Japan. I'm giving everyone a choice, you can bail out now over land with my blessings or we're going to have to ditch in the Yalu (I think) Sea. Reports are the N. Koreans are killing all navigators on the spot, I'm staying with the ship."

All the crew members elected to stay with ship, and were wearing exposure suits. It was either very late evening or night. They barely cleared the cliffs at edge of sea, taking small arms fire, and pilot made a perfect ditch about 2 miles offshore. Ron was only one injured, he cut his head pretty badly because he was still on radio giving their position, maydays, etc. All crew got out and then climbed into 2 rafts. Then the NKs started lobbing rounds at them. I can't recall the name/number of the rescue aircraft that came to get them, but that pilot landed in some very tough conditions to pick them up. When all the crew members were on board, the waves were breaking over the plane and the pilot told the B-29 pilot, "I can't get her off in these conditions". B-29er said, "Son, it beats the hell out of a rubber raft, let's taxi out to those destroyers offshore." They did and had to jump back in ocean to be picked up by Navy ship.

BTW he was a fairly small guy, about 5' 6 or 7".

Same pilot, who was supposedly one of the best they had, and his crew including my cousin were later sent on a near suicide mission to take pics of first Russian nuke explosion. The thinking was they would have to ditch in North Sea because of lack of fuel. All were volunteers. Result, they stripped everything they could out of aircraft, topped off tanks while engines were running at end of strip, took off, took the pics, and landed in, I think, Greenland with cups of fuel left.

Gato, cool story, thanks.

While we were in the bomb bay we could see the crew access tunnel running to the back of the aircraft, it sure wasn't very wide. A woman that works for the CAF told us her dad was a radio operator and was half way through the tunnel when the plane started to take AAA fire and tried to turn around and go back forward and got stuck.