Tibbets waves from his cockpit before the takeoff, 6 August 1945. General (USAF, retired) Paul Tibbets, has his own web site dedicated to the plane at With a brilliant flash, the bomb devastated most of the city below. Tibbits (19152007), ordered the release of the atomic bomb, Little Boy, at 8:15 in the morning. The Smithsonian's site on the Enola Gay includes links to crew lists and other details. The Enola Gay, named for the mother of the commander for the bombing mission, was sent on the first of two missions to Japan. Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and. 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay, manned by a crew from the U.S. The Enola Gay will be a keystone exhibit at the National Air and Space Smithsonian's new Udvar-Hazy Center museum at Washington Dulles International Airport, scheduled for completion in December 2003. He went on to write 'Hiroshima,' a nonfiction account of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, which was published in August 1946 in the New Yorker. The Enola Gay has been fully restored and is currently hangared at the Smithsonian Institution's Paul E. As of February 2003, Little Boy and Fat Man were the only two nuclear weapons ever used offensively during wartime. six signature (copies) of the men who were aboard during its flight. The second weapon was known as " Fat Man". A photograph of the Enola Gay, the Airplane used to drop the first atomic bomb on. The Enola Gay was followed only two days later by another B-29, called " Bocks Car", which dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the plane's pilot, named her after his mother. She was one of only 15 B-29s modified to deliver atomic bombs. Army Air Force's 509th Composite Group and flew her mission out of Tinian, a small island in the Marianas chain. The Enola Gay was the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.