NBAA’s No Plane-No Gain information campaign was created several years ago to combat the image of business aircraft portrayed in mainstream media as the private conveyances for top-level company executives heading to a teetime. According to NBAA’s campaign website (www.noplanenogain.com), few bizav flights in fact carry executives, with the majority (74 percent) being time-critical trips by sales, technical and middle management employees.
Yet, in a recent case involving Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy, the company announced that it was halting the personal use of its corporate airplanes by company directors in response to criticism from shareholders. One of the nation’s largest natural-gas providers, publicly-traded Chesapeake is facing financial difficulties, and its largesse to its directors in terms of salary and perks such as, free use of corporate aircraft, made an easy target for angered investors, one of whom filed a shareholder derivative petition with a district court of Oklahoma against the company’s executives and board members, alleging a breach of fiduciary duties, waste and unjust enrichment.
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.
