OT Southern California B29 ALERT

"FIFI", the last flying B29, is on display @ Van Nuys Airport this weekend. Watch for her if you are in the area over the next few days. She will be hard to miss if she flys over!

They're rebuilding another B-29 called
"Doc" . It was retrieved from the China
Lake target range. I hope this will be
the second B-29 to keep "FiFi" company.

That is good news about "DOC". I'm not familiar with this story at all. Who is doing the work, and where can I find out more about it? Is it going to be airworthy?

China Lake is where "FIFI" was flown out of. It is an interesting story about how she was fixed up and ferried out. Once her wheels left the ground there was no going back because the Navy wouldn't allow it.

[Barrett]

One of the Boeing sites has a detailed account of "Doc's" restoration at the Wichita plant. It was one of seven B-29s used by a test & evaluation unit (I think), each named for one of the dwarfs (dwarves?)
Quick!
Who can name all Seven?
Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy.
Quicker!
Who can name The Magnificent Seven?
Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, James Coburn...uh, the big guy looking for gold...and Horst Bucholtz (hey, if a Scot can play a Berber and a Russian/Estonian, then a German can play a Mexican!)
Finally:
Why is it called Seven-Up?

There was another B-29 that was a weather
plane forced down in Greenland and aban-
doned. It was found and rebuilt by a
group of men who braved the frigid weather and got ti in flying condition
only to have it catch fire while taxiing
for takeoff. They had jury rigged the gas
tank for the generator and it shook
loose causing the destruction of what
would have been another airworthy B-29.
It's name was the "Kea Bird."

There is a video from The Discovery Channel, NOVA, or one of those PBS shows about the efforts to get the "KIWI BIRD" off the ice where it had crashed. It concluded with the plane "burning down" in the end.