He was drawn to flying at an early age, never forgetting a summer day at the local racetrack. A stunt pilot let a 12-year-old Tibbets climb aboard his small plane and toss Baby Ruth candy bars to the crowd below, according to The New York Times. Tibbets later attended a private military preparatory school in Illinois and began taking flying lessons, despite his father’s wish for him to pursue a medical career. His mother, though, encouraged her son to follow his dream. “He said, ‘You’re going to be a doctor,’ and I just nodded my head and that was it. But about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it-I soloed-and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes,” Tibbets said, according to a 2002 interview in The Guardian. In 1937, Tibbets withdrew from the University of Cincinnati’s medical school and joined the U.S.
Army Air Corps (which became the U.S. Air Force in 1947). Los Alamos National Laboratory Training for a secret mission named his B-29 bomber the "Enola Gay" after his mother, who long supported his dream of becoming a pilot. Tibbets piloted various observation aircraft and bombers, including the B-17, which he flew in bombing raids above German-occupied Europe in the summer of 1942. The aircraft would prove a game changer for the U.S.īy mid-1943, Tibbets began flying a new, innovative bomber: the B-29. military, says Kirk Otterson, from the Office of Nuclear and Military Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was larger and faster than a B-17 and could fly higher and farther. And, he adds, the B-29 could carry a larger bomb. Nicknamed the Superfortress, the B-29 was a four-engine, propeller-driven bomber.