B-29 Doc flight test Kickstarter exceeds funding goal

A Kickstarter campaign to restore "Doc", a B-29 Superfortress, has exceeded its funding goal a month after the campaign launched.

The crowdfunding campaign was launched to fund the restored war plane's flight testing. The campaign, which will soon make Doc the second operational B-29 Superfortress, concluded with 1,007 supporters pledging a total of $159,151. The Kickstarter was the first attempt by the non-profit organization Doc's Friends to crowdfund the restoration process.

"This was a leap of faith for us," said Doc's Friends board member Tom Bertels. "We knew Doc had a lot of friends, but now we know Doc has family around the world."

The organization had 30 days to raise its stated goal of $137,500, and managed to raise about half of that in the two days following the announcement. Doc's Friends reported a high number of direct donations inside and outside of the Kickstarter campaign. The additional funds will be allocated to the plane's flight test program.

Doc was delivered to the U.S. Army in 1945, five months before another B-29 was used to drop two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. The Superfortress was used in several non-combat missions, assigned to radar calibration duty in 1951. Later, it was used for target practice by the U.S. Navy.

Doc was rediscovered by Tony Mazzolini in 1987 in the Mojave Desert. Mazzolini began leading the effort to restore the plane in 1998.