Paul Tibbets Flew the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, Then Spent a Decade Running the Jet Company That Became NetJets

At 8:15 and 17 seconds on the morning of August 6, 1945, a single bomb fell out of a B-29 at 31,600 feet (9,630 m) over Hiroshima. The man at the controls had 43 seconds to throw the bomber into a turn steep enough to outrun the shock wave.

That pilot was Paul Tibbets, and those 43 seconds are almost all most people know about him. His flying life actually ran from a barnstormer’s open cockpit in 1927 to the president’s office of a private jet company in the 1980s.

This is the aviation career the biographies skim: why the Army picked him, what the mission demanded of the pilot, and the second career almost nobody connects to the Enola Gay.

Who Was Paul Tibbets?

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. (1915 to 2007) was the US Army Air Forces pilot who commanded the 509th Composite Group and flew the B-29 Enola Gay on the first atomic bomb mission, against Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. He was a 30-year-old colonel at the time.

Before that, he flew B-17s in the first American heavy bomber raids on occupied Europe and became one of the most experienced B-29 pilots in the world. After the war he retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966, then helped run Executive Jet Aviation, the company now called NetJets.

Why the Army Picked Him for the Bomb

Tibbets got the job because by 1944 almost nobody else had his mix of combat command and bomber test time. He had first flown at 12, in 1927, riding with a barnstormer who dropped Baby Ruth candy bars on little parachutes over Hialeah Park in Florida.

He left medical school to join the Army Air Corps in 1937 and earned his wings at Kelly Field, San Antonio, in 1938. By February 1942 he commanded the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bomb Group, flying the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.

The first American heavy bomber raid on Europe

On August 17, 1942, 18 B-17Es of the 97th took off from England, with 12 bombing the railroad yards at Rouen-Sotteville in France and six flying a diversion. Tibbets was in the cockpit of the lead ship, Butcher Shop, alongside group commander Col. Frank Armstrong.

Accounts differ on which of the two sat in the left seat, but they agree no bomber was lost. On October 9, 1942, Tibbets led the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe, against Lille, and he also flew Maj. Gen. Mark Clark to Gibraltar.

The B-29 test pilot who used two WASPs to shame the doubters

In February 1943 he was sent home to help fix the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a program in trouble after chief test pilot Edmund Allen died in a prototype crash. Flying out of Wichita, Tibbets soon had more time in the B-29 than any other pilot.

He found that stripping out the guns and armor made the bomber about 7,000 pounds (3,200 kg) lighter. In mock combat against a P-47 at 30,000 feet (9,100 m), the lightened B-29 could escape simply by turning away.

Crews still feared the B-29, which was bigger than anything they had flown and prone to engine fires. So Tibbets trained two Women Airforce Service Pilots, Dora Dougherty and Dorothea Moorman, and sent them around in a B-29 named Ladybird. Dougherty had never flown a four-engine airplane before.

It worked: the men stopped complaining once women were flying the airplane they called too dangerous. Air Staff Maj. Gen. Barney Giles shut the tour down after a few days, saying the women were “putting the big football players to shame.”

What the Hiroshima Mission Asked of the Pilot

The Enola Gay was not a standard B-29. Glenn L. Martin’s plant in Nebraska built a batch of Silverplate bombers for the mission, with every gun turret except the tail removed, the armor plate taken out and the bomb bay rebuilt for an atomic weapon.

Fifteen Silverplate aircraft went to the 509th. Tibbets picked serial 44-86292 himself while it was still on the assembly line, which displaced its regular commander, Robert Lewis, who flew the mission as co-pilot and was angry about it.

Robert Oppenheimer had warned Tibbets that his aircraft might not survive the shock waves. The answer was the escape turn: after release, Tibbets made what he called “the required 155-degree turn away from the target,” putting as much distance as he could between the bomber and the burst.

The Enola Gay took off from North Field on Tinian at 2:45 a.m. and reached Hiroshima about six hours later. The bomb exploded 43 seconds after release, about 1,800 feet (550 m) above the city.

Three shock waves reached the bomber: the first at 2.5 G, the second at 2 G, then a smaller third. Tibbets later recalled a peculiar taste in his mouth and a cloud already 10,000 feet above them by the time they turned to look.

He had only named the airplane the day before, on August 5, 1945, after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. Nearly 80,000 people were killed instantly, and almost every building within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the burst was destroyed.

The Enola Gay survives today at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, after a restoration that took nearly two decades. Of every B-29 built, only two still fly today.

A 60-Year Flying Life in Dates

Hiroshima sits roughly in the middle of a career that started with candy drops and ended in business aviation.

The jet years were not a footnote. He spent 1950 to 1952 as project officer for the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, then commanded the 308th Bombardment Wing and the 6th Air Division before his promotion to brigadier general in 1959.

The Second Career: The Company That Became NetJets

This is the part of the story almost nobody knows. In 1964 a retired Air Force general, Olbert “Dick” Lassiter, founded Executive Jet Airways, later Executive Jet Aviation, with a fleet of ten Learjet 23s.

Its founding board read like a Strategic Air Command reunion with a Hollywood guest list. Gen. Curtis LeMay and Paul Tibbets sat on it, and so did two entertainers who were also pilots, James Stewart and Arthur Godfrey.

Tibbets joined the company after leaving the Air Force in 1966 and tried, unsuccessfully, to expand it into Europe. He left in 1968, but Bruce Sundlun, who took over as president after the banks foreclosed in 1970, brought him back that year.

On April 21, 1976, Tibbets succeeded Sundlun as president of Executive Jet Aviation. He held the job until 1986, consulted for a year, and retired for the second time in 1987.

That company’s fleet has since grown bigger than Southwest Airlines’. The man who flew the first atomic mission ran it through the years when the idea behind it was being born.

The Myth: Did Paul Tibbets Regret Hiroshima?

In 1975, Tibbets said he was proud of the plan. He also said, “I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people,” and added, “I sleep clearly every night.”

His view never changed. In 2005 he said the killing had been foreseeable, and that his job had been to end the war as quickly as possible.

In 1976 he flew a restored B-29 over an air show in Harlingen, Texas, while a charge on the runway sent up a mushroom cloud to re-create the attack. Japan was outraged, and the US government issued a formal apology; Tibbets said the display “was not intended to insult anybody.”

He was just as deliberate about his death. Tibbets asked for no funeral and no headstone, fearing either would give protesters a place to gather, and his ashes were scattered over the English Channel.

The Tibbets Name Still Flies Bombers

The 509th did not disband after 1945. Its successor, the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, flies the world’s only fleet of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.

On June 5, 2015, Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets IV, the Enola Gay pilot’s grandson and a former B-2 squadron commander, took command of that wing and its 5,500 airmen. “If my grandfather was here today, he would tell all of you how proud he is,” he told them.

Tibbets earns his spot among the most famous pilots in history for one morning over Japan. The rest of the logbook, from the first B-17 raid to the first fractional jet company, is the part worth knowing too.