Paul Dye cannot remember a time when he was not fascinated with flying.
Dye dedicated his life to aviation. At 17, he earned his private pilot license before earning a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1982. While studying at the University, Dye interned as an engineer at NASA through their cooperative education program, and his career took off from there.
“As good as the education is at the University, you do not learn engineering in school,” Dye said. “You get a bunch of tools in your toolbox, but you gotta learn engineering by being on the job.”
Dye, 67, of Bemidji, Minnesota, became the longest-serving flight director in U.S. history after serving NASA for 20 years. In 2024, the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame inducted Dye after his sister nominated him for his roughly 50 years of flying and Minnesotan pride.
After graduating college, he continued working for NASA as a backroom flight controller, where he played a supportive role for other flight controllers. After one mission, he was promoted to front room flight controller for the Spacelab Instrument Pointing System, or IPS, a device that provides more accuracy and stability to telescopes, cameras and other equipment to observe space.
Dye became a flight director in 1993 with call sign Iron Flight, which he chose to honor the iron ranges of Northern Minnesota, where he grew up.
“People enjoyed being on the Iron Team,” Dye said. “They knew they were gonna work hard when they were on the Iron Team, but they enjoyed it.”
As a flight director, Dye ensured the safety of astronauts and the success of the space mission.
He directed the first docking of a space shuttle to the Russian Mir Space Station, repaired the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the creation of the International Space Station.
In all of his work, Dye said he is most proud of his accomplishment as the lead flight director for the Shuttle Radar Topography Mapper, or SRTM, mission, which created a digital map of Earth’s elevations.
The SRTM flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, the fifth and final spaceship built by NASA. It collected data from nearly 80% of Earth’s land surfaces to create the first global data set of land elevations, according to NASA.
The database is the basis for all maps and will be for the next hundred years, Dye said. He is hopeful for the future of the space program in the U.S.
“The space program will continue. We will probably go back to the moon, then we will go onto Mars and we will continue exploring,” Dye said. “The subtle benefit about the space program that most people don’t understand until you tell them about it is that the space program is really about life here on Earth.”
Dye retired from NASA in 2013. He now works as editor-in-chief of Kitplanes Magazine and as an aviation consultant, testing and building planes.