From Mission Control to Homebuilt Airplanes, with Paul Dye

John Zimmerman (0:00)

Today on Pilot's Discretion, our guest is former NASA Flight Director and experimental airplane expert Paul Dye. He talks about managing missions to space, the craft of homebuilding, and flying the Fisk Arrival. Pilot's Discretion starts right now.

Hi Pilots, I'm John Zimmerman and thanks for listening to Pilot's Discretion from Sporty's. Visit sportys.com/podcast for today's show links and access to the archives. And remember you can send us an email anytime at podcast at sportys.com.

Today my guest is Paul Dye who like so many guests on Pilot's Discretion has enjoyed a distinguished career in multiple fields. He spent over 30 years at NASA serving as the agency's longest tenured flight director where he led mission control through dozens of space shuttle missions. His fascinating book about those years published in 2020 is called Shuttle Houston, My Life in the Center Seat Mission Control. But as you might expect, Paul is also deeply rooted in general aviation. He is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet about experimental aircraft I would say. Having personally built multiple airplanes, including his well-known Vans RV-8, he has flown over 130 different aircraft types and was the editor of Kidplanes magazine for many years. Paul, welcome to Pilot's Discretion.

Paul Dye (1:23)

Thanks. It's great to be here. Always fun to talk airplanes.

John Zimmerman (1:26)

I want to start with NASA because so many people know you from that role. In one of your articles years ago, you cited a fantastic story that I think has applications for GA pilots. And I would guess there are lots of lessons from the world of NASA that GA pilots can apply to our flying. But the classic one you referenced was about during Apollo 12

And the legendary flight director Chris Kraft told a young controller, quote, Young man, you do not have to go to the moon today. Which I think is one of the great lines that I've ever read about spaceflight. Tell us why that story is important to NASA culture and what the lesson might be there for GA pilots.

Paul Dye (2:05)

Yeah, you know, it's very similar to making sure you don't get homeitis.

The setup was simple. Apollo 12 launched into a thunderstorm and they got hit by lightning.

The entire spacecraft rebooted. It went off line. Fortunately, the rocket kept on course because it had separate computers. And there were two things that happened on it. The first was that Jerry Griffin was the flight director, and his EECOM or his Eagle called up and said, flight take SCE to AUX. And Jerry had absolutely no idea what that meant. And neither did the commander Pete Conrad, but the KEPCOM read it up, and Al Bean knew that switch, and he took it to AUX, and all the data came back. And it was a real example of the kind of trust that you develop with years and thousands of hours of working together with people, that Jerry had no idea what that call meant, but it was important, so he did it. And shortly after that, they limped into orbit, and they had two hours to decide whether they were going to go to the moon or whether they were going to abort the mission and dump the whole stack in the ocean. And this thing had been hit by lightning, for heaven's sake. I mean, that's pretty bad when you've got a complex vehicle like that. And Chris Kraft, who had moved up to the Mission Operations Director, came down to the Flight Director, and the Flight Director had all the authority to make the decision, go or no go, and nobody else could overrule him. But the pressure on him from the program that he felt was immense. You know, you don't want to abort the mission if you don't have to. It was many, many, many millions of dollars. And Chris came up and said, young man, you do not have to go to the moon today. And that took half of the pressure off the equation. It took all of the non-technical stuff out of the equation. And why is that important? They ended up going to the moon that day because technically the spacecraft turned out, checked out okay and they had a very successful flight. That's very important, especially when you're doing something like experimental test flying.

You're going to do a first flight of the airplane you've been building for three, four, five, six years. If you tell all your friends you're about to do that first flight, they all show up, they all want to be there, they all want to be part of it. And the winds are a little bit more than you really want them to be, or there's a little bit of an oil drip coming out of the cowling, and you really need to take the cowl off before you go fly that thing. And it's always important to remember that Chris Kraft is standing there at your shoulders saying, young man, you do not have to fly today.