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

The world’s first firefighting-configured Sikorsky S-92A made its public debut at the rotorcraft manufacturer’s booth this week at Verticon. Developed by S-92 lessor Milestone Aviation in cooperation with operator VIH Helicopters, it marks the first utility-configured S-92 available to the commercial market.
The program was launched last summer in British Columbia with the assistance of government wildfire management agencies.
According to the companies, this S-92A has the capacity to carry up to 19 passengers, internal/external cargo, or 5,000 liters (1,320 gallons) of water in the expandable belly-mounted custom-built Helitak carbon fiber tank. The external tank weighs less than 700 pounds empty and is supplemental type certificated for the large-cabin helicopter. With its snorkel, it can fully fill from a body of water in just 48 seconds and can be removed from the helicopter in less than 30 minutes.
Other features include a lighter cabin interior, bubble window on the pilot side to enable more precise water drops and increased visibility when refilling, and exterior power gauge mounted just below this window for use during refilling.
VIH Aerospace is performing the reconfiguration in-house, a process that takes approximately four months. CEO Jen Norie noted it has received a lot of interest in the conversion, and VIH expects to have three converted S-92 operational by the third quarter.
“We’re seeing these wonderful aircraft coming off of the offshore service after 20 years still with lots of life left in them, and so that’s why we’re doing this program to reconfigure them,” said Norie, who sees this as a growing product line for the company. “There’s going to be more and more of them—it’s going to be the future of the business.”
There are currently more than 260 S-92s in service. Its airframe has a life-limit of 30,000 hours, according to Leon Silva, Sikorsky’s v-p of global commercial and military systems.
“We expect that the customer’s will keep the [S-92] aircraft in the high utilization missions for example, offshore where they are flying 1,500-to 2,000 hours a year and then when the aircraft gets close to the end of its life, then you are flying a couple hundred hours a year with one of these and then use it for another 10 years,” Silva told AIN.

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At its booth this week in Verticon, Sikorsky exhibited the first S-92 equipped for fire fighting, a joint project between Milestone Aviation and VIH Helicopters.

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Verticon 2025

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Sikorsky S-92

The Milestone Aviation Group Limited

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