Bill was Editor-in-Chief of Business & Commercial Aviation from 2000 to 2020. During his stewardship, the monthly magazine received scores of awards for editorial excellence.
He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the National Business Aviation Association; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Aerospace Media Awards; the Aviation Journalism Award from the National Air Transportation Association; and an Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award for Business Aviation.
Previously, Bill served as Managing Editor of Aviation Week Television. He was the top editor for both Flying and Professional Pilot magazines, as well as a member of the senior editorial staff at Reader's Digest. He also managed communications for FlightSafety International.
Bill has authored or co-authored three aviation books, was an essayist for National Public Radio, wrote aviation documentaries for The Discovery Channel and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian Air & Space, Popular Mechanics and The Associated Press, among others.
An active aviator, Bill holds a Commercial Pilot license, along with multiengine, instrument, seaplane and glider ratings.
It may be tough going for many in business aviation these days, but there’s not a hint of a slowdown at FltPlan.com. In fact, the free computerized flight planning and filing service is going gangbusters. It now submits 65% of all the flight plans for business flights conducted by turbine aircraft; total filings from all sources (no airlines) brushed 200,000 in August, a record. On average, 20,000 flight plans are calculated (though not necessarily filed) on the web-based system every day.
Two of general aviation’s most familiar faces were about to appear, errantly, in mug photos after Santa Barbara, Calif., police ordered John and Martha King at gunpoint to exit their aircraft. The police said they had been notified by the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), a federal multiagency operation, that a stolen aircraft on an IFR flight plan was destined for their airport. When the Kings, well known for their aviation instructional videos, arrived from San Diego on Aug. 28 to join friends for lunch, ground control directed them to a remote area of the airport.
The latest setback in the Boeing 787 program, when combined with the problems bedeviling Lockheed Martin’s F-35, years of delays for the Airbus A400 military lifter and the long gestation of the colossal A380, could recast aircraft development schedules as so much wishful thinking, a kind of institutionalized fiction.
