Restored Hiroshima B-29 is headed for museum : The Enola Gay, which dropped the A-bomb, is near mint condition. Smithsonian will exhibit it.

On Aug. 5, 1945, after the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima was loaded in the bomb bay of B-29 Superfortress No. 82, Col. Paul Tibbets sent for a sign painter.

Shortly thereafter, a young Army Air Corps enlisted man, pulled away from a softball game, carefully inscribed the name “Enola Gay” in foot-high letters beneath the pilot’s window.

The next day, the 30-year-old colonel and the airplane he named for his mother became one of the significant and enduringly controversial figures in the history of warfare: They dropped the first atomic bomb. Five years after that blinding flash, the weapon was estimated to have caused 200,000 fatalities.

For nearly a decade now, technicians have been at work restoring the bomber, perhaps the most famed artifact of World War II, to mint condition.

“Our objective,” said Bernie Poppert, a onetime aircraft mechanic who has been one of the leaders of the effort, “is to preserve the history of the technology, so people can look at it 250 years from now and see exactly how it was done.”

But for even longer than technicians have worked to preserve the plane, officials have debated what should be done with it. They have decided that 50 years after the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy” on Japan, the plane will be put on display in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

The restoration, one of the most extensive such projects ever undertaken, is nearly complete.

Mechanics have taken the huge engines apart, removed and restored the wings and landing gear and refurbished the cockpit, bomb bay and .50-caliber machine guns in the tail.

The compartment where Tibbets and his crew guided the mission to Hiroshima now looks as it did when the new plane was turned over to the 509th Composite Bomb Group in 1945.

Stored in a dim, unheated hangar at the Smithsonian’s Paul E. Garber facility--where other historically important planes await restoration--the fuselage attracts a steady stream of visitors who make their way out to this Washington suburb.

They have included Tibbets and Japanese survivors of the bombing nearly half a century ago.

The decision to put the bomber in the spotlight at the Air and Space Museum was not easily made.

The plane’s 132-foot wingspan created a huge problem for a museum already packed with priceless civilian and military aircraft and space vehicles. But there was more to it than that.

“We looked at the subject for some years,” said Michael J. Neufeld, a museum curator specializing in World War II-era aircraft. “People have very strong feelings about this plane because of the sensitivity about nuclear warfare. We have gotten surprising and contradictory responses about it. We get people saying that we’re hiding the aircraft. We have people saying that it shouldn’t be displayed at all because it would be a celebration.”

Most visitors who come here stare silently through the glass of the bullet-shaped nose into the compartment where Tibbets and co-pilot Robert Lewis sat, and where bombardier Thomas Ferebee aimed the bomb for Aioi Bridge in downtown Hiroshima.

“The first time I saw it in 1987, it gave me a very creepy feeling,” Neufeld said. “It really did.”

Ownership of the plane was transferred to the Smithsonian in 1949, but it was parked at several Air Force bases until 1960, when technicians began taking it apart.

During that time, including seven years when it sat unnoticed on a ramp at Andrews Air Force base near Washington, souvenir hunters made occasional forays against it and scratched their names into the fuselage.

Serious restoration work began in 1984, and three years later, a decision was made to put it on display.

So, in 1995, the forward section of the fuselage, including the bomb bay and cockpit, will be taken to the Air and Space Museum, remaining there for several months as part of a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bomb.

Later, plans are to reattach the wings and landing gear and put the entire plane on permanent display at an Air and Space Museum annex to be built adjacent to Dulles International Airport outside Washington.

There it will be joined by other historic planes--numbering in the hundreds--that cannot now be displayed in the current museum for lack of space.