Only Two B-29s Still Fly, and Both Were Once Navy Missile Targets

The B-29 Superfortress was one of the most advanced American bombers of World War II: pressurized, with remote-controlled gun turrets and four 18-cylinder engines. Its program cost $3 billion, more than the Manhattan Project that built the bombs two B-29s dropped on Japan.

Today you can count the flying ones on two fingers. And both of them spent decades parked in the California desert, where the U.S. Navy used them as targets.

Here is where the two survivors are, how they got out of that desert, and why even these two spend so much of each year on the ground.

How Many B-29s Are Still Flying?

Two, as of September 2026: FIFI and Doc. They are the only airworthy examples of the 3,970 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses built before production ended in May 1946.

Name	Serial / registration	Base	Operator	First flight after rescue
FIFI	44-62070 / N529B	Dallas, Texas	Commemorative Air Force	August 1971
Doc	44-69972 / N69972	Wichita, Kansas	Doc’s Friends (a nonprofit)	July 17, 2016

Both are active this year. FIFI has been on its 2026 tour since April, with stops from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio, and sold-out ride flights in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the end of August. Doc flew from Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport on September 12, 2026.

Until Doc’s first flight, FIFI was on its own. The two did not fly together until the EAA AirVenture show at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July 2017, the first B-29 formation since the type left U.S. Air Force service in the early 1960s.

Both Came Out of the Same Desert

The flying B-29s were not preserved by careful owners. They were saved from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a Navy test range in the Mojave Desert that took in retired bombers and used them as targets.

Doc arrived there in 1956 after years of radar calibration and target-towing work. FIFI followed in 1958 and was used as a ballistic missile target.

The price of Doc’s release is the detail most people miss. The Navy agreed to let the bomber go only if Mazzolini supplied a restored B-25 Mitchell for the National Naval Aviation Museum, so he found one in South America and restored it first.

That exchange took until 1998. Doc then spent 16 years being restored in Wichita by hundreds of volunteers, including retirees who had built B-29s at the same Boeing plant in the 1940s. In 2015 Doc’s Friends estimated it would cost $7 million to $9 million to finish the job, get Doc flying and give it a permanent home.

Where the Other B-29s Are

B-29 production wound down after the war, and many aircraft went into storage and were eventually scrapped as surplus. Others served through the Korean War and in a range of roles through the 1950s, and the type was retired in the early 1960s.

Twenty-six survive in complete form, according to Wikipedia’s survivor list, and 24 of them are in the United States. The most famous two are museum pieces for good reason: Enola Gay is at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and Bockscar is at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Almost all of the others are on static display, with a handful in storage and one listed as under restoration. We could find no publicly announced project to return a third B-29 to the air.

Why So Few Fly: The Engine

In wartime, the B-29’s Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone was the biggest source of its maintenance headaches and catastrophic failures. It is also the part behind both survivors’ recent groundings. It is an 18-cylinder radial with two rows of nine cylinders, 3,350 cubic inches in all.

In wartime service the rear row overheated, partly because the gap between the cylinder baffles and the cowling was too tight to pass enough cooling air. The engines also tended to swallow valves.

The worst failures were fires. The crankcase had a high magnesium content, and a magnesium fire could burn at close to 5,600°F (3,090°C), hot enough to cut through the wing’s main spar in seconds. Wartime crews replaced engines as often as every 75 hours.

The engine outlived that reputation. After a redesign it powered postwar airliners such as the Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-7, and 50,192 were built before production ended in 1961.

FIFI shows what that means 80 years later. In 2006, after a run of engine problems including a failure during an air show, its squadron grounded it. The restoration took four years and cost $3 million, and all four engines were replaced with custom hybrids.

Those hybrids combine parts of two later versions of the engine, the R-3350-95W and the R-3350-26WD, drawn from the Douglas A-1 Skyraider and the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar. FIFI flew again on August 5, 2010.

Why So Few Fly: Even Two Is Hard Work

A good year shows what these aircraft can do. In 2019 Doc toured 21 cities in 10 states, flew more than 115 hours and carried passengers on more than 70 ride flights.

But “airworthy” does not mean available. In 2026 alone, Doc lost months of its season to engines.

Two of its four engines went in for heavy maintenance in December 2025, and the tour that should have started in April was pushed back while one engine sat with the engine vendor. After an air show flight at Moses Lake, Washington, in June, one propeller and engine “entered an operating mode that requires further inspection.”

Stops in Twin Falls, Idaho, Wendover, Utah, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, were canceled, and August ride flights in Wichita slid by a week. By September, Doc was back on tour.

FIFI went through the same thing a year earlier. In 2025 a pre-flight inspection found a fault in the supercharger system of engines No. 2 and No. 4, which were sent from Texas to Vintage Radials in Tehachapi, California, for repair.

Two tour stops were canceled, and the Commemorative Air Force launched an appeal to cover the bill, raising its target from $50,000 to $100,000. FIFI was back in the air by the start of July 2025.

What One Hour in a B-29 Costs

Doc’s Friends publishes its numbers. Doc burns about 450 gallons of 100LL avgas per flight hour, roughly $3,375 of fuel at $7.50 a gallon.

Add engine and propeller reserves, maintenance, insurance and the Wichita hangar, and the group puts the all-in cost at $12,000 to $15,000 per flight hour. Doc typically flies about 150 hours a year.

FIFI’s numbers are in the same range. In 2021 the Commemorative Air Force put its operating cost at about $10,000 an hour, including roughly 400 gallons of fuel, with an all-volunteer crew.

Rides pay part of that. A Doc flight has 11 seats: the bombardier’s seat in the glass nose at $1,500, three forward seats at $1,200, and seven gunner seats in the back at $600. A sold-out flight grosses $9,300 for a ride of about 30 minutes.

Selling those seats takes permission. Carrying paying passengers in a former military bomber needs a special FAA exemption, known as a Living History Flight Experience, which covers limited and experimental category warbirds.

The FAA’s own policy says these exemptions give owners a way to offset “the considerable restoration, maintenance and operational costs” of flying them.

FIFI’s seats sold for $725 to $1,375 at its Fayetteville stop in 2026. The gap between ticket revenue and hourly cost is covered by donors, sponsors and volunteer crews, the same model that keeps the three B-17s that still fly in the air.

Why “Only Two” Is Not the Whole Story

The other common assumption is that the B-29s disappeared in combat. Combat is only part of it: after the war, many went into storage and were scrapped as surplus, long before anyone thought of them as history.

That is also why both flyers came from a weapons range. While much of the fleet was being scrapped, China Lake held on to FIFI and Doc for the Navy’s own use, and that kept them whole enough for volunteers to come and get them.

So if you hear four big radials over an air show and look up at a silver bomber with a glass nose, you are seeing one of two. It spent decades waiting to be blown up, and it is flying on engines that someone just spent the winter rebuilding.