It was the last time the Enola Gay flew. Two other notable aircraft put in storage at Pyote was the B-17D "Swoose" (arrived 18 January 1952 - Departed December 1953) which was the only B-17 to survive the bombing of Clark Air Base on 8 December 1941 and manage to escape from the Philippines, and the XB-42 Mixmaster, a one-of-a-kind aircraft. Beginning in 1950, the demands for B-29s to be used in the Korean War meant that nearly 100 of the aircraft stored at Pyote were refurbished and sent to active-duty units on Okinawa for use in combat, while some stored B-29s were authorized to be used for cannibalization to furnish spare parts to operational aircraft. Many of the B-29's stored at Pyote would be flown by the men of the 19th Bomb Group. This is the same group that was the first to serve at Pyote in 1943. However, the air battles between the B-29s and Soviet MiG-15s, in the skies of North Korea made it clear that the age of the jet had arrived which made most of the propeller-driven combat aircraft stored at Pyote obsolete. After the 1953 Armistice in Korea, the Air Force ordered most of the remaining planes at Pyote to be scrapped, and activity on the base was sharply curtailed. Its mission became the reclamation and salvage of the stored aircraft. The B-29s stored at the base were very important as the reclamation process consisted of removing all serviceable and reparable items to support the operational B-29s still in service. A smelter was installed on the base and as the aircraft were disassembled and parts removed, the remnants were recycled with the metal sold for scrap. The last Base Commander, Lt. Col. Max A. Piper, was notified that the base was scheduled for deactivation on 31 December 1953, and the base went on standby status, leaving only a twenty-seven man caretaker crew to maintain the facility. The last plane left Pyote AFB sometime in 1955 along with the standby crew. At that time most of the permanent buildings and hangars remained, although abandoned. In April 1958, the base was reopened as Pyote Air Force Station (TM-186), a radar installation acting as one link in a chain of installations that were part of an early warning network in case of Soviet air attack during the Cold War. The 697th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, an Air Defense Command 34th Air Division unit, operated a radar site approximately southwest of the main containment area .