A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in 2007, Curt came to&nbsp;the publication&nbsp;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&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;sister publication&nbsp;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&nbsp; Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with&nbsp;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.

Senior Editor

Curt Epstein

Aircraft records platform provider Bluetail has added a new workflow management tool to its software portfolio that it claims will drastically reduce the time and paperwork load to conform Part 135 aircraft. Introduced this week at NBAA-BACE 2022,&nbsp;the module known as Mach Conformity&nbsp;can slash the time it takes to perform conformity inspections by up to 50 percent, according to the company&nbsp;(Booth 2421).

 


Developed with the advice of operators such as Solairus Aviation, Wheels Up, Wing Aviation, and Jet It, the system builds on Bluetail’s existing record storage platform that&nbsp;allows documents to be digitized (either scanned by the customer or at more than 120 partner locations across the U.S.) and uploaded in a searchable, shareable form. The company has developed a proprietary machine-learning AI system to quickly locate documents, or even pertinent pages inside larger documents, which can then be indexed and filed in specific color-coded folders in a conformity binder according to status.

 


In terms of airworthiness directives and service bulletins, the appropriate remedial backup documents can be virtually paperclipped to the notices, providing immediate verification of compliance, including dates, actions, and approvals that can be easily and instantly exported to the local FAA Flight Standards District Office&nbsp;if requested. Once developed, the binder framework can also be preserved and exported for another aircraft, saving the operator from having to start from scratch.

 


“We always take the analog world process that is happening, and we look for opportunities where we can digitize it and make people’s lives better and easier,” Bluetail co-founder and CEO Roberto Guerrieri told AIN. “In the Part 135 world, cutting three days out of a conformity could be $100,000 of revenue to an operator.”

 


This week at the show, new customers who subscribe to the Bluetail platform will receive a complimentary pair of Bose earbuds.

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