Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the pilot who flew the B-29 Superfortress when it dropped Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. After leaving the Air Force in 1966, he worked for Executive Jet Aviation, serving on the founding board and as its president from 1976 until his retirement in 1987.
About Paul Tibbets in brief
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the pilot who flew the B-29 Superfortress when it dropped Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. After leaving the Air Force in 1966, he worked for Executive Jet Aviation, serving on the founding board and as its president from 1976 until his retirement in 1987. He married Lucy Frances Wingate, then a store clerk at a store in Columbus, Georgia, on June 19, 1938. The couple had two children, a son, Paul Warfield Jr., and a daughter, Enola Gay, who died in a plane crash on December 11, 1998. The family later moved to Iowa, where he was raised, and where he graduated from Western Military Academy in 1933. He then attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, and became an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta chapter of Sigma Nu fraternity in 1934. He had planned to become an abdominal surgeon, but changed his mind and enlisted in the U.S. Army as a pilot in the Army Air Corps in 1937. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and received his second rating in 1938 at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. He later became the commander of the 509th Composite Group, which would conduct the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1944. He participated in the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946, and was involved in the development of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet in the early 1950s.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 80 in 1987 in Florida. He has been remembered as one of the most influential figures in the aviation industry. He also served as the chairman of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and as the president of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s. His funeral was held on February 25, 2013. He will be buried at Fort Benning with his wife, Lucy FrancesWingate, a Roman Catholic seminary teacher, at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgia, where they had been married for more than 40 years. He never had any children and is survived by his wife and two children. He served in World War II as a captain in the 97th Bombardment Squadron. He flew the lead plane in the first American daylight heavy bomber mission against Occupied Europe on 17 August 1942, and the firstAmerican raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe on 9 October 1942. In the late 1920s, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida, to escape from harsh midwestern winters. In 1927, when he was 12 years old, he flew a plane piloted by barnstormer Doug Davis, dropping candy bars with tiny parachutes to the crowd of people attending the races at the Hialah Park Race Track. After his undergraduate work, he transferred to University of Cincinnati to complete his pre-med studies there.
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