While Houston Hobby Airport hosts thousands of business aviation flights each year, I wonder how many of the crews transiting the airport are aware of the old Municipal Airport Terminal? It’s something that I didn’t know still existed until a trip to Houston earlier this year, for the opening of the new Million Air FBO/company headquarters. Driving on Telephone Road on the west side of the airport, I noticed the white art-deco wedding cake-shaped building set back from the street, along with a few signs advertising it as the 1940 Air Terminal Museum.
Like the other vintage terminals still in existence around the country, the one at Hobby stands because of some specific circumstances. Opened in 1940 when the airport was known as Houston Municipal, the Streamline Moderne design structure served as the airport’s primary terminal and administrative offices for 14 years, until the rising airline traffic and growing size of the aircraft it served rendered it obsolete.
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.
