News Archive

Veteran aviation correspondent at major big city daily wins AOPA honors for reporting, advocacy

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has honored longtime aviation correspondent and columnist Jack Elliott of The Newark Star-Ledger with its Max Karant Journalism Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Elliott has written a column on general aviation for the Sunday Star Ledger for 36 years. Writing to an audience in one of America’s most rapidly urbanizing states, Elliott has helped educate readers on general aviation’s activities in New Jersey, and its trials and tribulations as airports are gobbled up for housing developments and other land uses.

“New Jersey is one state where general aviation has had to ‘fly in the face’ of urban/suburban sprawl since the first housing boom after World War II,” said AOPA Senior Vice President of Communications Drew Steketee, himself a New Jersey native.

“Jack fearlessly ‘tells it like it is’ to a readership that’s a tough sell and includes the baby boomers whose new homes have now consumed even more of the state, threatening more airports.”

Elliott has been an outspoken critic of weak state aviation policy, mayors who sell out their community airports, and new homebuyers who attack long-established airports. He has bluntly reported on Atlantic City’s efforts to renege on federal grant assurances and stewardship of its downtown Bader Field Airport, and he cast the spotlight on official non-support of the state’s effective former aviation director.

Elliott was inducted into the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in 1986. In 1993, the New Jersey Legislature honored him for three decades of dedication to the aviation community. The New Jersey native, a graduate of New York University, holds a commercial pilot certificate with instrument, glider, and seaplane ratings.

“Jack has never pulled his punches, and it’s been an uphill battle for years,” said Steketee. “He’s a fighter for general aviation. Max Karant would have been proud.”

Elliott is one of the last aviation correspondents whose work still appears regularly in a major daily newspaper.

The AOPA award was presented at AOPA Expo ’99 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

99-4-057

December 1, 1999