Ten miles and two minutes from their destination the. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. The seventh and most important aircraft was one named the Enola Gay, in honor of the mother of its pilot. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. Eatherly is standing in the center of the. his path to joining the crews of both the Enola Gay (Hiroshima) and. The B-29 Superfortress crew that flew over Japan and radioed that the weather appeared clear before the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. was a member of the flight crew on both atomic bomb missions against Japan. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. Paul Tibbets Jr., piloted the B-29 during World War II. Paul Tibbets IV, right, the 509th Bomb Wing commander from Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., pose for a photo inside Doc, a restored B-29 Superfortress, June 9, 2017, on McConnell AFB, Kan. Mark Novak, left, a B-29 Superfortress pilot and Brig. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. Grandson of Enola Gay pilot flies refurbished B-29. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.