During a recent trip down to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I was alerted to the fact that this month is the 45th anniversary of one of the stranger tragedies in aviation. While everyone is familiar with 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson,” when Captain Chesley Sullenberger put his A320 glider smoothly down off the riverbank of Manhattan, suffering no fatalities and earning admiration from the aviation industry and beyond, the ditching of a now-defunct Overseas National Airways DC-9 in the Caribbean did not go as smoothly and possibly set the stage for protocols that saved lives in the US Airways accident nearly four decades later.
It was while speaking with Bill Bohlke Jr., an airline pilot for some 40 years, a flight examiner since 1970, FAA Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award recipient, and CEO of St. Croix-based FBO and charter provider Bohlke International Airways, that I learned of the events on May 2, 1970, when I was two years old. As a St. Croix-based pilot and flight instructor at the time, Bohlke played a key role in the rescue of survivors from the ditching of the aircraft, which was operating as ALM Flight 980.
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.
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