A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in 2007, Curt came to&nbsp;the publication&nbsp;from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;sister publication&nbsp;Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s&nbsp; Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with&nbsp;Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.

Senior Editor

Curt Epstein

The alphabet organizations that champion the cause of aviation to elected officials and government agencies can’t do it all alone. That was the message at a recent Westchester Aviation Association (WAA) meeting held at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y. On the national, regional, state and local levels, organizations that speak for their business and general aviation constituents are discovering that the concerns they raise are in many cases the first times elected officials have heard of the issues. 
“The saying is and has always been that all politics are local,” said WAA president and former NBAA chairman Jeff Lee. “There is only so much that our tremendous general aviation associations can do for us inside the Beltway. When they approach a congressional representative inside the Beltway they are just another lobby [group]. When the local folks at White Plains, Teterboro or Morristown approach their politicians, they are voters, they are constituents, they are people who can influence what happens to that politician’s career, so we need to speak out and tell them how we feel.” When pending legislation threatens the activities of general aviation, such as in cases of community encroachment upon existing airports, individuals are encouraged to become more active and to join local user groups to better express their needs.
Lisa Piccone, NBAA’s senior vice president for government affairs, cited industry criticism of the Transportation Security Administration’s proposed 
<link news>Large Aircraft Security Program as an example of the collective power of individual voices. Based on the more than 7,000 comments filed, the TSA is revising the proposal to incorporate feedback from operators and airport officials. 
Even on the local level such activism is important, according to Paul Lange of the Connecticut Business Aviation Association, which has made a concerted effort to meet local politicians and the leaders of the state’s transportation committee. “What we learned from our legislators was that they hear from the auto interests, they hear from trucking interests, they hear from boating interests, but they never hear from aviation interests, and they encouraged us to rectify that.” Based on its interaction with the legislators, the association was recently able to defeat a proposed moratorium aimed at preventing Bridgeport Airport from acquiring a parcel of land for use as a runway safety area.&nbsp;

Aviation groups: users must lobby local officials 

The alphabet organizations that champion the cause of aviation to elected officials and government agencies can’t do it all alone.

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