Two of the rarest airplanes still capable of flight are touching down at Millington-Memphis Airport this month, giving Mid-South residents a shot at walking the ramp beside — or even flying aboard — World War II bombers that exist nowhere else in operational form. The Commemorative Air Force AirPower History Tour sets up at 8182 Hornet Avenue from Wednesday, August 19, through Sunday, August 23, with the ramp open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.
The headline attraction is the Boeing B-29 Superfortress known as FIFI, one of only two airworthy B-29s left anywhere in the world, according to the Shelby County Fire Department. Of the nearly 4,000 B-29s built during the war, FIFI is one of just two still able to take to the sky, a rarity detailed by Vintage Aviation News. The bomber will fly Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., per the fire department's event listing, with ground tours available the rest of the schedule whenever the aircraft isn't in the air.
Joining FIFI is the Consolidated B-24 Liberator Diamond Lil, which the dossier notes is the world's only remaining flyable B-24 — a striking fact given how many Liberators once rolled off American assembly lines during the war. The B-29 itself carries outsized historical weight: it was the airframe that carried out the atomic bombing missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, according to background compiled by High Sierra Pilots.
Ticket Prices and What They Cover
Ramp access, which includes free cockpit tours, costs $20 for adults and $10 for youth ages 11 to 17, while children 10 and under get in free, per the event flyer shared by the Shelby County Fire Department. That admission price does not cover an actual ride aboard any of the aircraft. Passenger flights are a separate purchase, and a single seat aboard Diamond Lil runs $725, with the full flight experience — briefings, taxiing and roughly a 30-minute flight — lasting about 90 minutes total.
Cockpit tours begin at 9 a.m. on weekdays and shift to a noon start on Saturday and Sunday to accommodate FIFI's morning flights. Rides can be booked in advance at airpowertour.org, and organizers are warning that seats fill quickly. Beyond the two headline bombers, the tour lineup includes a T-6 Texan, a PT-13 Stearman, an RC-45J SBN and a B-25 Mitchell, though the fire department's post cautions that the attending aircraft list is subject to change.
An Airfield Built for Bombers
The runway making all of this possible has its own wartime pedigree. Millington-Memphis Airport traces back to 1917, when the site was established as Park Field before expanding into Naval Air Station Memphis in 1943, a facility that trained hundreds of flight cadets and thousands of ground personnel during the war, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia. A 1993 Base Realignment and Closure decision later transferred nearly 2,000 acres of the base to the City of Millington, creating the municipal airfield's 8,000-foot runway — infrastructure originally built for military transport aircraft and still capable of handling heavy vintage bombers today, per details from Millington-Memphis Airport. The field operated as Millington Municipal Airport before adopting its current name in 2016.
The AirPower History Tour isn't the only large-scale aviation event the airport hosts; it also regularly stages the Flag City Fly-In and the MidSouth Airshow featuring the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, according to the airport's own event listings.
No Federal Funding Behind the Restoration
Keeping 1940s-era bombers flying isn't cheap, and the Commemorative Air Force's B-29/B-24 Squadron gets no help from Washington to do it. The organization operates as an all-volunteer non-profit that receives no financial support from the federal government or the U.S. Air Force, relying instead on more than 300 volunteer members nationwide to maintain and operate its historic fleet, according to the squadron's own mission statement. That means the admission fees and flight-ride sales collected in Millington go directly toward keeping these aircraft airworthy.
That work is not without setbacks. FIFI only returned to active touring in June 2025 after several months of critical repairs to two of its Wright R-3350 engines, part of a restoration effort stretching back to 1971, when the bomber was rescued from a California desert bombing range, according to Vintage Aviation News. It wasn't the plane's first major overhaul — FIFI underwent a four-year engine replacement project between 2006 and 2010 to address problematic propulsion systems, the same source notes.
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