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Paul Dye

Paul Dye
903 POSTS 26 COMMENTS
Paul Dye, KITPLANES® Editor at Large, retired as a Lead Flight Director for NASA’s Human Space Flight program, with 50 years of aerospace experience on everything from Cubs to the Space Shuttle. An avid homebuilder, he began flying and working on airplanes as a teen and has experience with a wide range of construction techniques and materials. He flies an RV-8 and SubSonex jet that he built, an RV-3 that he built with his pilot wife, as well as a Dream Tundra and an electric Xenos motorglider they completed. Currently, they are building an F1 Rocket. A commercially licensed pilot, he has logged over 6000 hours in many different types of aircraft and is an A&P, FAA DAR, EAA Tech Counselor and Flight Advisor; he was formerly a member of the Homebuilder’s Council. He consults and collaborates in aerospace operations and flight-testing projects across the country.

In-Flight Weather: Practice for Survival

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This was going to get ugly. Crossing southern Louisiana in the middle of the afternoon in late May is never pretty. Today was going to...

The Virtual Fly-In

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Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and in these days of social isolation from COVID-19, aviators who still want to congregate for community support...

Ride the Wave!

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Oh, for a sailplane on a day like today! I took off on a short after-breakfast flight to do a little post-maintenance test hop....

Turbine Temptation: Into the Air

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No parts left—let’s fly!

Statistics, Lies and Damn Lies…

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Aviation is a numbers game. We fly the airplane by the numbers, we use numbers to navigate and we have to deal with numbers...

Flying in the Age of COVID-19

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My wife and I just returned from a week-long trip to Colorado’s ski country and experienced the current airline travel system first-hand. (No, we...

It Was a Simple Job…

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I was just looking for one wire—one measly wire that I knew was excess, something I had installed years ago in order to test...
Subsonex paint

Turbine Temptation: Adding Some Color

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John Stahr performs airbrush magic on the jet.

Dear FAA: Model Aircraft Are Not Drones

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Sometimes when you set out to fix one problem you create one (sometimes many) more. That’s what I think is happening now as the...

Socked In On a CAVU Day

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Lake Tahoe can be a funny place. Surrounded by gorgeous countryside, it salutes the forested western slope of the Sierra on its California side,...

In Case You Missed It

Wind Tunnel

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To find the speed, lose the drag.

Building the Bearhawk LSA

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Working on the wings.

The Case of Electrical Dropouts

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Electrical gremlins can be tough to track down. This month’s case involved a non-builder...

Dakota Super 18

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Unparalleled slow-speed handling characteristics set this Cub apart. By Bill Repucci.