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 aircraft market is consistent and stable, according to aircraft brokers speaking in a panel discussion on current market conditions on Tuesday at NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas. “We feel like demand is very strong right now,” said Don Dwyer, co-managing partner at Guardian Jet. “We’re having our biggest year ever.”
He believes that it wasn’t just Covid that brought new entrants to business aviation but the underlying 15-year economic bull run as well. “It’s that creation of wealth that fuels our business, we haven’t seen that go away.”
While the used jet inventory is rising following the record lows of the pandemic, there is no sign of panic selling, according to Brad Harris, president and CEO of Dallas Jet International. "We’re seeing a lot of supply increase, but when you were at 2% [of the fleet on market] and now we’re back up to 6% or 7%, it’s still a seller’s market, and one thing we are seeing is the prices aren’t diminishing rapidly.”
“There’s definitely more supply than there was at the peak, which was the end of 2022, and since January 2023 the market has been definitely getting more inventory, but it's still less inventory than it was before Covid started,” explained Steve Varsano, founder of The Jet Business. “When there was nothing available, people had to buy stuff they didn’t want to because they didn’t have any other choices. There’s a much better product available [now] than there was in the peak.”
He noted that aged aircraft are not inherently unsafe, but the question is how long the maintenance facilities will service the equipment on the aircraft before you have to start replacing it. “This is where the cost of ownership and operating becomes much more expensive than the value of the airplane.”
In the post-Covid boom, there was much discussion over the “stickiness” of the new private aviation users—whether they would remain after the threat of the pandemic subsided and commercial air travel resumed.
“There was this great concern that a lot of those people were going to leave—this was the question everyone was asking for a couple of years, and I think we would all say total opposite,” said JetAviva CEO Emily Deaton. “They’ve not only stayed, they’ve continued to repeat purchase. They’re fully committed to remaining in the industry because they found that they absolutely need it to continue to live the way they want to live whether that’s for business or personal use. That has been a huge thing that has helped support demand as well.”
Regarding the stability of the market values, Dwyer noted, “People are not expecting to make money on their airplane now. They’re not losing their shirts, either. But if you have something that the market’s in demand—a super-midsize, large cabin—we see it holding well.”
Harris said one trend has been the return of corporate flight departments to the buyer’s market over the past year and a half, resuming fleet replacement schedules that were interrupted by the pandemic and eyeing the preowned market. “Some of the corporates are saying, ‘I don’t want to pay $10 million more for this brand new airplane, I want preowned, and then you’ve got the guys that say I want preowned, I’m not willing to wait two years.’”

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