Photo By Senior Airman Karalyn Degraffenreed | Donald Obreiter, 97th Maintenance Squadron director and lead flight engineer on the...... read more read more
Subscribe
Nearly every week for more than a decade, Donald Obreiter, 97th Maintenance Squadron director, joins a team of volunteers in maintaining the B-29 Superfortress ‘Doc’ at its hangar in Wichita, Kansas.
Since 2012, Obreiter has contributed to the restoration efforts for Doc as the aircraft’s maintenance director, devoting thousands of hours to ensuring that one of only two airworthy B-29s in the world can still fly.
“I started out working on the other B-29, ‘Fifi’, down in Fort Worth in 2002,” said Obreiter. “Then in 2012, I joined the Doc team and I had four years of overlap where I was working on both aircraft before I left the other organization in 2016 to join Doc full-time.”
More than a dozen team members from the 97th Maintenance Group have become an integral part of Doc’s upkeep. Volunteers who spend their weekdays maintaining the KC-46 Pegasus, KC-135 Stratotanker, and C-17 Globemaster III rotate in and out, offering up their weekends to help keep Doc in the air.
“We have so many skilled and dedicated people, not just in maintenance, but across the base,” said Obreiter. “When it comes to this airplane, it’s 80 years old, and it takes a lot of effort to keep things going, so for us to be able to tap into the talent we have here at Altus is really special.”
People like Robert Elliott, 97th Maintenance Squadron corrosion specialist, and his wife of 32 years, Michele, 97th Maintenance Squadron electronics integrated systems mechanic, have spent almost every weekend of 2025 in Wichita, helping to add the finishing touches to Doc’s restoration by painting the original 1952 markings along the aircraft.
“I had been talking with Mr. Obreiter about Doc, and I said I was interested in volunteering, and things just took off from there,” said Michele. “Robert was a little hesitant at first, but once he got into it, he was all in. We've been up there nearly every weekend since.”
For the last four months, Michele and Robert helped lead the repainting process and have been instrumental in coordinating the project to ensure historical accuracy of all the markings. The Elliotts also worked alongside team members from Hangar 517 - Scott Weaver, Danny Sanchez, and Nicky Jones, 97th Maintenance Squadron corrosion specialists, to get Doc as close to his original condition as possible.
“It’s like touching a piece of history,” said Robert Elliott, 97th MXS corrosion specialist. “The B-29 did most of its duty during the Korean War, so I thought it would be a great tribute to paint the original markings as they would have been seen during that time.”
Doc was rescued from the Mojave Desert in 1987, where it sat abandoned for decades, weathering the elements. In 2000, a group of volunteers began the process of restoring it to flight. When Obreiter joined the effort in 2012, the aircraft was still far from airworthy.
However, Doc took to the skies again in 2016 and since then, it’s flown across the country, attending airshows and giving the public a chance to see a B-29 in flight.
“I was actually part of the test crew for the initial flight,” said Obreiter. “It’s hard to describe how surreal it felt after four years of seeing all the big pieces fit together. It was exciting the first time it left the ground.”
Check out Doc in flight alongside the KC-46 and KC-135 during the Altus Airpower Stampede Open House and Air Show April 12-13, 2025.
| Date Taken: | 04.02.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 04.08.2025 22:05 |
| Story ID: | 494893 |
| Location: | ALTUS AIR FORCE BASE, OKLAHOMA, US |
| Web Views: | 49 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Keeping History Alive: Altus A-Team volunteers to keep ‘Doc’ soaring, by SrA Karalyn Degraffenreed, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
