The search for the world’s most famous missing pilot has gotten strange. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) has launched several expeditions in recent decades in the South Pacific to locate Amelia Earhart, and just weeks after the organization showed off sonar images from its latest attempt that “could” be the ill-fated aviatrix’s Lockheed Electra 10 under several hundred feet of water, one of its major sponsors filed a lawsuit claiming that the group defrauded him of more than $1 million that he put up to finance the 2012 expedition. He asserts that the group already found Earhart’s Electra on its previous expedition in 2010.
(Was I asleep that year and missed the most important aviation archeology announcement of the last 76 years? No, I had a child born that year, so I’m reasonably certain I was awake.)
A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined AIN in 2007, Curt came to the publication 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 AIN sister publication 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 Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with 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.
