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During that time, Tibbets took private flying lessons at Miami's Opa-locka Airport with Rusty Heard, who later became a captain at Eastern Airlines. 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. In the late 1920s, business issues forced Tibbets's family to return to Alton, Illinois, where he graduated from Western Military Academy in 1933. In 1927, when he was 12 years old, he flew in a plane piloted by barnstormer Doug Davis, dropping candy bars with tiny parachutes to the crowd of people attending the races at the Hialeah Park Race Track. One day his mother agreed to pay one dollar to get him into an airplane at the local carnival. As a boy he was very interested in flying. When he was eight, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida, to escape from harsh midwestern winters. When he was five years old the family moved to Davenport, Iowa, and then to Iowa's capital, Des Moines, where he was raised, and where his father became a confections wholesaler. was born in Quincy, Illinois, on 23 February 1915, the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets Sr.
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After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic. Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938.
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He is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the Enola Gay (named after his mother) when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. (23 February 1915 – 1 November 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiĬharter Pilot and President of Executive Jet Aviation.