Remember the B-29.

Once there were thousands of these aircraft. 3,970 were built between 1943 and 1946. They pounded Japan into submission and brought peace to the world in 1945.

Now there's just one left that flies. One. And here it is, Fifi, the last flying B-29, starting it's engines and doing it's thing, nearly seventy years after leaving the Boeing plant.




Just imagine hundreds of these in the air at once. Imagine them flying formation overhead. Those were the days when no one doubted America's technological and military might.

Those were the days.

And here's one that doesn't fly any more, but when it did...

The Enola Gay. Now at the Smithsonian Air & Space Annex. This is the one that dropped the first atomic bomb and brought the curtain down in World War Two.




And here's the other famous B-29, Bocks Car. This one dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki after the Japanese didn't take the hint from the first one. This one is at Wright-Patterson AFB Museum.



The world will never see their like again. They're all gone now. All but one.

Of course there would have been two flying today, but for Daryl Greenamyer's carelessness...RIP, Kee Bird, the B-29 that almost made it home.