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

After more than 18 months of development and testing, private aviation industry consultancy FBO Partners is launching HangarIT cloud-based hangar occupancy software this week at the 2024 NBAA Schedulers &amp; Dispatchers Conference (SDC).
According to the company, HangarIT is the first purpose-built platform designed to store, manage, and optimize revenue from aviation lease and sublease agreements such as hangar space and offices. It can also provide on-demand hangar occupancy reports allowing service providers to increase revenues from transient aircraft storage.
The system is intended to provide flexibility for all operators, ranging from independent FBOs to large chains, to airports, with a user interface that includes analytics tools, occupancy and pricing metrics, and rent roll reporting. Through integration with JetNet’s database, HangarIT can also accurately identify and verify turbine aircraft by registration, serial number, and type.
By using the platform’s roll call feature, it can capture and record all movements of tenant and transient aircraft to provide an accurate inventory of available hangar space. The system’s lease forecasting tool will offer added insight on the revenue side by monitoring lease renewal rates, identifying vacancies, and providing an overall view of the facility’s real estate portfolio.
“The days of tracking FBO tenant agreements with a spreadsheet and a Dropbox file are dead,” said FBO Partners president and HangarIT co-founder Douglas Wilson,” adding that property management revenue makes up at least 30 percent of a typical FBO’s income, a percentage that is growing as the industry looks to house the growing private aircraft fleet. “Until HangarIT, no dedicated platform existed in our industry to organize, monetize, and grow an FBO’s portfolio of hangar customers.”
The price for the software-as-a-service is approximately 1.5 percent of the subscriber’s monthly rent roll, in addition to a lease set-up fee. Wilson estimates that the typical hangar keeper will see three to four times the return based on the annual subscription pricing.
By the end of the second quarter, StackIT—a bolt-on module currently in Beta testing—will be available as part of the basic HangarIT platform. This module is an integrated hangar stacking visualization tool that can provide users with a dynamic, graphic representation of their existing hangar capacity.
Wilson and his team are on hand this week at the show &nbsp;to demonstrate HangarIT's capabilities.

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FBO Partners is launching its HangarIT real estate tracking platform

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Private aviation consultancy FBO Partners has launched its cloud-based hangar occupancy software at NBAA’s Schedulers & Dispatchers Conference this week. 

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