Copied from Nationaljournal.com/thegate:

Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died yesterday at age 92. He lived in Columbus, Ohio, where he ran an international air-taxi service after leaving the military as a brigadier general in 1966.

Paul Tibbets in the Enola Gay The Columbus Dispatch reports that Tibbets was under hospice care after being ill with heart disease. He told the Dispatch in 2005 that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over the English Channel, although his family said final arrangements are not set.

He was 30 years old on Aug. 6, 1945, and an experienced World War II pilot who had gotten his start dropping leaflets for a candy company out of the backseat of a biplane. The Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, was named after his mother.

Tibbets, who gathered some media attention over the years, said repeatedly that he didn't regret the decision to drop the bomb.

"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview. "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war, and you use anything at your disposal.... I sleep clearly every night."

After the initial drop that killed nearly 80,000, Hiroshima continued to mount casualties from the radiation's aftereffects: 130,000 out of a population of 350,000 were dead by the end of the year. Japan surrendered nine days later, after the U.S. also dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

"If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified," Tibbets said later. "The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."