It took every ounce of horsepower, every metre of tarmac to get the 60,000 kg aircraft airborne. The Enola Gay was 7,500 kilograms overweight due to the heavy fuel load and the weight of its onboard ordinance that morning.
#Enola gay named after full#
At the controls Tibbets and his co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis carefully built the four Wright R-3350 engines to the roar of full power, released brakes and slowly began to lumber down the 2,500-metre runway. When the huge bomber named ‘Enola Gay’ after Tibbets’s mother, reached the end of the runway it turned 90 degrees and was pointed in the direction of the Japanese islands some six hours’ flight time away. Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, named his plane after his mother.“It took every ounce of horsepower, every metre of tarmac to get the 60,000 kg aircraft airborne.”Īt approximately 2.45am on AugUSAF pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets, taxied the silver Boeing B-29 Superfortress towards the end of the floodlit runway ‘A’ at North Field, Tinian Island in the Mariana’s. The baby girl name Enola is pronounced as iy-N OWLuw- †.ġ: Enola is primarily used in the English language and it is also of English origin. The story goes his grandfather was reading the book just before his mother was born and thus her name. Yes, it sounds like Ebola, yes backwards it is Alone, and yes it is the name of a plane called the Enola Gay. The name is a late 19th-century coinage of disputed origin. It has been suggested that the name could be invented from a reversal of the word 'alone', or else it could be Native American in origin. It has been made known by 'Enola Gay', the B-29 Superfortress bomber which dropped the first atomic bomb in the attack on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. After undergoing modifications, the Enola Gay was ready to join the tests.
The airplane was named after the pilot Paul Tibbets' mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, who was in turn named after the heroine of a novel. Tibbets flew her to Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls but then found himself and his. Just as its counterpart the Enola Gay, the Bockscar had been altered to serve the purpose of carrying and deploying the heavy bomb. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the planes pilot, named her after his mother Enola Gay Tibbets (who in turn was named after the heroine of a novel). The name has also appeared in literature, borne by a character also called Enola Gay in Martin Amis' black comic novel London Fields (1989). Adaptations included removing most of the armament installing heavier racks to support the heavy bomb and replacing the engines. The plane was named after Frederick Bock, the planes commander. Variant forms inherit the origin and meaning of the name Enola.Ģ: Enola is of Native American origin. See also the related categories, english, word (element), mother, heroine (conqueror), fields (meadow), paul, literature, invented, and american.Įnola is an uncommon baby girl name. At the height of its usage in 1904, 0.007% of baby girls were named Enola. The baby name has seen a fall in frequency since then, and is currently used on a very modest scale. Within all girl names in its family, Enola was nevertheless the most widely used in 2018.Ī baby name that sounds like Enola is the name Imala.