During my extended stay in Asia following this year’s Asian Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition (ABACE) in Shanghai, an interesting item in the international edition of The New York Times caught my eye. “As China’s mastiff mania dims, dogs are discarded,” read the front page headline. The article detailed how Tibetan mastiffs, a breed of dog that looks like a cross between a lion and a grizzly bear (and only slightly smaller) which a few years ago could fetch prices as high as $200,000 among China’s status-conscious elite, are now being abandoned, in some cases sold off for meat and their skins at $5 a head, amid the current political climate. According to the author Andrew Jacobs, the current decline in the dog’s popularity is just one indication of a changing bigger picture: “China’s boom-to-bust luxury landscape is strewn with devalued commodities like black Audis, Omega watches, top-shelf Sorghum liquor and high-rise apartments in third tier cities. Some are the victims of a slowing economy, while others are casualties of an official austerity campaign that has made ostentatious consumption a red flag for anticorruption investigators."
While Jacobs does not mention private aircraft ownership, arguably, one could add that to the list. Having attended each of the ABACE shows since its relaunch four years ago, I have seen the mood there range from crackling with positive energy in the first years to a seemingly quieter simmer this year.
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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