Years from now, if people ask me where I spent the great (and hopefully only) blizzard of 2016, I will have to say “a lot of places.” Having been in Tampa attending NBAA’s annual Schedulers and Dispatchers Conference, I was aware of the increasingly dire weather predictions and was initially willing to dismiss them as media hype.
Besides, the show didn’t end until Friday afternoon, and the heavy stuff wasn’t due until late Friday night, by which time I should surely be home. Therefore, it came as a surprise when I received the text from United notifying me that my flight that night was already cancelled. As soon as my last session ended, I started working the phone to United, trying to score a seat on the next available flight. After a lengthy wait on hold, I was informed that the next flight would be Monday evening out of Orlando, but I should try again the next day. When I called back on Saturday morning, after another lengthy wait, I was told there was a flight to Newark on Sunday departing from Fort Lauderdale, an approximately four-hour drive. Despite my wife’s suggestion that I just wait it out in Orlando and go to Disney (not in my book while she was stuck shoveling 30 inches of snow), I hopped in my rental and headed south. As I was eating dinner Saturday night, I once again received the text of doom from United. Yes, my Fort Lauderdale flight was now also off the board. Back at my hotel room, I dialed United. While I like Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue” as much as the next guy, after hearing it repeatedly while I was on hold for more than two hours, I never want to hear those chords again.
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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