Fundraising for B-29 ‘Doc’ slow as campaign nears end

With less than 10 days to go, a Wichita group trying to get its B-29 Superfortress known as “Doc” back in the air still hadn’t reached 50 percent of its $137,500 fundraising goal.

As of Monday afternoon, Doc’s Friends had raised $65,215 from 635 donors through a 30-day-long Kickstarter campaign the group launched on Sept. 29.

The rub is, if the group doesn’t reach its goal by Oct. 29, it won’t get a dime of the money it has raised thus far, according to a Kickstarter policy. Those who pledge donations only pay if the campaign reaches its goal within 30 days.

“It’s still encouraging to be at $65,000,” Tom Bertels, a Doc’s Friends board member and managing partner of advertising firm Sullivan, Higdon & Sink, said Monday afternoon. “We kind of have to wait and see.”

Bertels, the group’s spokesman, said it’s not time to panic. He said his group was told by Kickstarter that it’s not unusual for successful campaigns to see a brisk start with lots of money raised days after launching a campaign, followed by a lull in fundraising that picks up briskly again in the final few days. A Kickstarter spokeswoman said in an e-mail to The Eagle on Monday “that’s generally correct.”

Officials from the group said that they had turned to Kickstarter for fundraising because they felt they had relied too much on Wichitans to finance the airplane’s restoration, which began 15 years ago.

“Wichita has been very, very generous in this and I have sometimes wondered if we haven’t gone back to the well more than we should have,” Bertels said.

Doc’s Friends officials also thought the Kickstarter campaign could reach a much broader base of potential donors.

Bertels said if the fundraiser isn’t successful it will delay the first flight of the B-29. The donations would pay for the $70,000 in fuel and oil, $50,000 in insurance and $10,000 in maintenance the group estimates it will cost to earn the airworthiness certificate and achieve first flight.

“I would foresee the flight test program taking a lot longer,” he said. “We have some money, but not enough to get through flight testing, honestly.”

Bertels was upbeat on Monday afternoon, noting that the group had just a few hours earlier received its second, $5,000 funding commitment since the campaign began.

“If we could get 20 more of those that would be awesome,” he said.

And Bertels said he remains optimistic that the Kickstarter campaign will reach its goal next week.

“The board collectively is confident we’re going to hit our Kickstarter goal,” he said. “If the rest of the board is confident, I’m confident.”

Tony Mazzolini rescued Doc from a Navy bombing range in the Mojave desert in California in 1987. In 2000, he had pieces of Doc trucked to the former Boeing Wichita for restoration by a cadre of volunteers, including some who had originally worked on the B-29 production line.

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 October 19, 2015 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Fundraising for B-29 ‘Doc’ slow as campaign nears end."