Paul Dye, EAA 751070, the longest-tenured flight director in NASA history, whose life has been intertwined with general aviation since a young age, will be presenting about his career and aviation experiences as part of the EAA Aviation Museum’s Aviation Adventure Speaker Series on Thursday, April 19.
Growing up in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, Paul was building and flying models in grade school, helped rebuild a couple of wrecked J-3 Cubs when he got a bit older, and earned his pilot certificate at age 17.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in aeronautical engineering, Paul joined NASA, where he would go on to serve as the longest-tenured flight director in the organization’s history. Now he’s an active member of the homebuilding community and is the editor of Kitplanes magazine.
As an aeronautical engineering major, Paul said getting a job with NASA out of college was a dream situation. But before he became a flight director in 1993, he had to make his way through the NASA organizational ranks. He started with working on projects on which he wasn’t necessarily an expert.
“The first thing they do when you show up is they put you in a discipline that’s completely different than what you studied in school, so they force you to be multi-disciplinary,” Paul said. “I showed up as a guy that was an expert in aircraft design and flight testing, and they put me in the computer systems for the space lab. So I was responsible for the computers in the space lab, which was a science laboratory that was carried on the [space] shuttle. Then I was responsible for the stellar pointing system that was part of that. So I learned computers and space navigation and stability and control systems and things like that.
“Then, after the Challenger accident [in 1986], they moved me back over to the orbiter side, and I became in charge of all the mechanical systems on the orbiter — the payload bay doors, the vent doors, the hatches, the structure, the hydraulics that are used to control the vehicle, the landing and deceleration systems for the landing gear, nosewheel steering, brakes, the drag chute was something I helped develop while I was there that was not there originally. So it was a very multidisciplinary group.”
In the late 1980s, Paul also worked with the Soviet space program, evaluating how the space shuttle could be incorporated into what the Soviet Union was doing, specifically regarding the Mir space station. Paul made numerous trips to the USSR during this period and gained various contacts, which made him an even more attractive choice to be selected as flight director. Between his start as a flight director in 1993 until his retirement from NASA in January of 2013, Paul was involved in 39 different missions and was the lead flight director for nine Shuttle missions.
Paul said he uses the movie Apollo 13 to explain to people what it’s like to be a flight director.
“Usually when I answer that question, I tell people, ‘Did you see Apollo 13?'” he said. “They say, ‘Yeah.’ The guy in the white vest with the crew cut — that’s [what I do]. That’s kind of the pop culture thing. The flight director is responsible for planning missions, training for them, and conducting missions. In flight, we are the ultimate real-time authority. We have the ultimate authority to make decisions relating to the flight. Once the vehicle is off the ground, we have the final say in real time of what happens. If the crew can’t talk to us, the commander gets the final say, obviously. Essentially we’re kind of the pilot-in-command from the ground. That includes a very, very large team of people in flight planning, flight training, actual flight controllers, and the flight crews and everybody else that make a mission happen.”
In his long career as a NASA flight director, Paul said there has been a multitude of special moments he’s been able to experience — so many that they start to run together. But there’s one mission in particular he said he’s especially proud of.
“I was there for all of the Shuttle-Mir missions as a flight director,” Paul said. “I was there when we built the Space Station, which was an amazing string of missions — but there was a mission we flew in the early 2000s called STS-99. It was the space radar topography mapper. In 10 days, we mapped topographically the entire planet. From 65 degrees north to 65 degrees south. We got everything but Antarctica. That map is the basis for all topographic maps and will be for the next hundred years. When you think about what that means to humanity, that’s Google Earth. Everybody uses Google Earth.”
While working at NASA, Paul stayed close to his aviation roots and remained an active homebuilder. Since retirement, he has had the opportunity to become even more involved and is currently the editor of Kitplanes magazine. While it certainly has a different feel than NASA, Paul said he is enjoying the change of pace.
“It’s a ball,” he said. “It’s really fun. The one thing about NASA and flying is the actual flying you do is limited, in terms of total number of hours. You spend a lot of time in meetings. One thing I don’t have to do in this job is spend a lot of time in meetings. I get to be out in the field. I get to fly airplanes, and I get to interface with people at big shows and visit companies that produce experimental aircraft kits and parts and stuff like that. It is apples and oranges, it really is. There are times when I almost forget that I spent 34 years flying spaceships because I’m having so much fun doing this.”
That said, Paul said he does still keep up with what’s happening at NASA and in the space industry. He said while there are certainly challenges when it comes to funding public space exploration, he pointed to the recent successes of commercial space exploration as something that’s an encouraging sign for the future.
“You can look at is as a glass half empty or glass half full kind of thing,” he said. “Funding has always been tough for NASA. It’s had a very stable funding base, but stable doesn’t give you what you need to do exciting new programs. It’s very, very difficult. So there’s a lot of turmoil going on and the real problem in the U.S. is that we have four-year funding cycles with those four years corresponding to administrations. Every time you get a new administration, they have to erase everything the previous administration did. I’m not one side or the other … but the bottom line is you can’t do a space program or go to Mars in four years. But I think that the commercial space stuff is very exciting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if you can develop a robust commercial program, that will keep space in people’s minds, and people will say, ‘Oh yeah, we can go to space anytime we want. Why don’t we go to Mars?’ And then it will happen.”
Photos courtesy of Ironflight.com