Group launches Kickstarter campaign to get B-29 ‘Doc’ in air

The group that owns and is restoring the Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Doc” launched a crowdfunding campaign Wednesday to get the bomber through its first flight.

Doc’s Friends aims to raise $137,500 through the 30-day fundraising campaign, which will be done through the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, officials from the nonprofit group said Tuesday.

Doc’s Friends chairman Jeff Turner and board member Tom Bertels told The Eagle on Tuesday morning that the fundraiser would help pay for various tests the airplane has to go through to reach first flight and ultimately, achieve its airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The costs of the airplane will soar during that process, they said. For example, insurance on the airplane is expected to jump to about $50,000. And each of the airplane’s four rotary engines consumer 125 gallons of avgas an hour.

“We think we’ll be flying by the end of the year,” said Turner, retired CEO of Spirit AeroSystems on Tuesday.

Doc’s Kickstarter page went live Wednesday. Officials said the page can be found at Kickstarter.com, on the group’s website, www.b-29doc.com, and on Doc’s Friends Facebook page, www.facebook.com/DocsFriends.

The fundraising campaign launch comes a week and a half after volunteers successfully started the World War II bomber’s engines for the first time.

The airplane was brought to Wichita in 2000 by Tony Mazzolini, who rescued it from a Navy bombing range in the Mojave desert in California in 1987.

Boeing’s Wichita plant turned out 1,644 of the airplanes – best known as the bomber type that dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II in the Pacific.

This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 11:17 AM with the headline "Group launches Kickstarter campaign to get B-29 ‘Doc’ in air."