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

Global business aviation traffic is down by 55 percent year-over-year as the industry continues dealing with the headwinds posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the latest statistics released on Thursday by data provider WingX. In its weekly Global Market Tracker, the company noted that the 113,000 legs flown thus far in May stands in contrast to the 254,000 a year before. On average, 2,600 business aircraft were active each day in May, representing 44 percent of the number usually deployed.

 


But the Hamburg, Germany-based WingX noted some cause for optimism as the seven-day rolling average jumped from 4,800 flights on May 1, to 6,800 on May 19. At its low point in mid-April, the total plunged below 3,700 daily flights. In contrast, commercial scheduled flights are still around 85 percent below normal levels.

 


“The improvement in daily activity is encouraging, as is the higher fleet employment, but its too early to see if this demand is resilient, or simply reflects the slight relaxation in government lockdown,” said WingX managing director Richard Koe. “The trajectory of virus suppression policy seems to indicate that international and especially intercontinental travel will be slowest to recover.”

 


So far this month, nearly 30 percent of all business aviation activity involved turboprops, mainly the Pilatus PC-12, Cessna 208 Caravan, and the Beechcraft King Air 200.

WingX: World Bizav Traffic Slowly Rising

While far below its normal pace of operations, the global business aviation industry has shown increments of improvement of late.

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