They are called the Greatest Generation, the soldiers, pilots, and sailors who fought and won World War II, and there are fewer of them every day. After the National World War II Memorial opened on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in 2004, Earl Morse, a retired Air Force captain and physician assistant who worked in a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Springfield, Ohio, realized that many of his WWII patients would not be able to travel to D.C. to visit it.
A private pilot, Morse offered to fly with two veterans to Washington, and in January 2005, he pitched the idea to fellow private pilots at his local Air Force aero club. That May, after forming a charitable organization and raising funds, six small airplanes each carried two WWII veterans to D.C. in what became the first Honor Flight. By the end of the year, that number had swelled to 126 veterans transported on a mixture of small aircraft and commercial flights.
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.
