On this date in 1954, the Strategic Air Command retired its last B-29 Superfortress to the aircraft storage facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Tucson, Arizona. The B-29 was the most technologically advanced bomber produced during World War II. The Superfortress was manufactured by Boeing at Seattle and Renton, Washington, and Wichita, Kansas by the Glenn L. Martin Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and by Bell Aircraft Corporation, Marietta, Georgia. After a rough teething period, the rapid war effort helped make the aircraft an eventual success. Though modest improvements were made, the Superfortress was underpowered, something its successor, the ten-engined Convair B-36, was not. Even in the late stages of the war, the Enola Gay had to be specially enhanced to be able to lift the first atomic bomb. Of the 3,990 built, only two B-29s remain airworthy, with the remaining twenty-four displayed at various museums in America, with two displayed in the UK, and South Korea.
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