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"Jack" Dailey said, "Because of the work of some very talented men and women, future generations will sense first-hand the unalterable significance of this aircraft in World War II and human history. In presenting the reassembled Enola Gay,museum director Gen. The center will ultimately house the 80 percent of the national collection of aircraft and large space artifacts not on view at the Mall building or on loan. The Udvar-Hazy Center, with an aviation hangar 10 stories high and the length of three football fields, allows the museum to display for the first time its largest artifacts.
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It will be displayed at the new center raised off the floor on 8-foot-high stands to accommodate other aircraft under its large wings. With a wingspan of 141 feet and a gross weight of 137,500 pounds, the Enola Gay is too large and too heavy to be housed intact in the museum's flagship building on the National Mall in Washington. The airplane's components had been transported to the center earlier this year over a period of weeks in 12 truckloads from the museum's storage and preservation facility in Suitland, Md. The airplane's forward and aft fuselage sections, wings, landing gear, engines, propellers and vertical stabilizer were brought together for the first time since 1960 in an arduous operation this spring and summer in the Udvar-Hazy (pronounced OOD-var HAH-zee) Center's aviation hangar. Restoration work on the Enola Gay began in 1984 and involved a total of some 300,000 staff hours. Udvar-Hazy Center, the museum's new companion facility in Northern Virginia, which opens to the public Dec. The airplane, which received the most extensive restoration in the museum's history, will be on display at the Steven F. 18) unveiled the newly reassembled Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress used to drop the first atomic bomb in combat. pilots and soldiers still risking their lives in dangerous places.Monday, Aug| 12:00am Media Inquiries Claire Brown 20 Public InquiriesĢ0 More information The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum today (Aug. But veneration of the Enola Gay solely as a magnificent technological achievement distorts and demeans our nation's history, doing no honor to the U.S. The point is not that the plane and the brave Americans who piloted it don't still deserve commemoration of course they do. The script for the new Enola Gay exhibit hews closely to the plane's gee-whiz features - its massive, 141-foot wingspan and its pressurized cabin, the first in bombers - and celebrates its contribution to the "Arsenal of Democ-racy." In response, nearly 200 historians and authors are pressing the Smithson-ian to redraft this script to include a balanced discussion of the atomic bombings. The end of that project coincides with the opening of an annex of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum adjacent to Dulles Interna-tional Airport. Since then, the bomber has been restored and reas-sembled. pilots, the Smithsonian scrapped its plans, instead displaying the Enola Gay with minimal commentary. In that last category were to be household objects found amid the Hiroshima rubble, accounts of bomb survivors and information on those killed and wounded.īut after protests from veterans groups that such information would tarnish the heroism of U.S. That exhibit was to include accounts from bomber pilots, documents exploring America's decision to use nuclear weapons and the consequences for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the second city to be hit by an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay's fuselage was last displayed from 1995 to 1998 as the centerpiece of an exhibit that Smithsonian officials had intended to depict the last, grim years of World War II. From tables and photographs that will line the hall where the B-29 bomber is parked, visitors can learn about the plane's construction and capabilities and about air power's triumphs in World War II.įor the second time in 10 years, the Smithsonian will show the Enola Gay devoid of the controversy that preceded its fateful flight or the nearly 60-year-long debate over whether the United States should have dropped the bomb. 6, 1945, hastening the Japanese surrender that ended World War II. As every schoolchild learns, the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. Beginning next month, visitors to the Smithsonian Institution's new Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia can see the Enola Gay, restored to a just-off-the-assembly-line shine.