Paul Dye
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.
Machine, Weld… Repeat!
The project was certainly educational, and those of you with lots of experience welding will chuckle at my expense.
How to Calibrate Angle-of-Attack on Garmin’s G3X Touch System
For pilots who fly with modern electronic flight instruments, having access to accurate, repeatable angle-of-attack (AoA) information can be transformative. But before you can...
Remembering Reno
Aviation just wouldn’t be the same without the races…no matter where they are held.
Stick Bushing
Things that move wear out. That’s buried in a law of physics I once learned having to do with entropy. In this case, that...
Plug That Hole!
Got an extra hole in your baffles? In this case, we were removing an unused purge valve return line that had penetrated the baffles...
Flight Review: Kitfox Super Sport with Rotax’s Turbo 916
KITPLANES editor at large Paul Dye took a couple of flights with Brandon Petersen in his Kitfox Series 7 Super Sport powered by the...
Minor Surgery
In my ongoing effort to equip our home fleet of airplanes with as many Angle of Attack systems as possible, we recently upgraded the...
Sometimes, Ya’ Just Gotta’ Fly
It was almost ten o’clock last night when the text came in from an airpark neighbor—“$2.99 per gallon Avgas at Yerington tomorrow from 0700...
In Case You Missed It
Headlong For Headers
Tom Wilson, an avowed hot rodder, details his foray into the world of custom exhausts and the performance gains found on his Lycoming IO-540.
Low Fuel, Idiot, Light
In the year 2019 BC (before COVID), I made a number of cross-country trips...