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.

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“Private equity has found our industry in a bad way,” said Flexjet chairman <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2026-01-13/flexjets-ricci-tapped-nbaas-sdc-keynote-address">Kenn Ricci</a>, speaking yesterday morning in the keynote conversation at the opening session of NBAA’s Schedulers &amp; Dispatchers Conference in Cleveland. “We have a lot of capital trying to find the next thing in our industry, and the result of that has been that innovation is getting stifled to some extent.”
Interviewed by NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen at the standing-room-only event, Ohio-native Ricci did not hold back on his opinion that this cash influx is having a deleterious effect on the business aviation industry. “What’s happening in the maintenance business, they’re rolling up all the mom-and-pop shops,” he explained, adding that as a result of the consolidation, five-year projections suggest maintenance labor costs rising to more than $300 an hour. “So private equity made an investment in this maintenance business with the vision that the investment basis is to get to $300 an hour in maintenance.”
Ricci pointed to the longer times now associated with maintenance activities in many cases. “That’s because private equity big money has narrowed the funnel in the interest of profitability.” Even engine hourly costs have seen an impact, according to Ricci. “You look at the hourly rates that they’re charging now; this influx of private equity is raising the cost.”
On the FBO side, he discussed the recent phenomenon of the special event fees, which universally draw the ire of aircraft operators. “Everyone of us negotiated a contract that probably included [lavatory] service and parking and a fuel surcharge, and whatever it needed to be. But they then invented a category called event fees, and it wasn’t in our contract, so now that’s private equity; they came into that industry.”
As a plus for business aviation, Ricci credited the airlines in their post-Covid actions for pushing what he described as the “frugal wealthy”—those who could afford private aviation, but for whatever reason chose to avoid it—into trying private flights. “When Covid hit, they gave up the frugalness, and then once they did that, they didn’t go back, and we see that.”
That stickiness has resulted in a demographic shift in the industry. “We have a whole different class post-Covid," Ricci explained. “Our average owner is 10 years younger, so we’re getting people to buy in at a younger age.” As well, he noted that the line between aircraft leisure use and business use has blurred.

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