On the air/In the air

With bags and camera gear spread out in his usual corner by the Terminal 2 North security checkpoint, Muntean is coordinating with CNN producers for a 9:12 walk-and-talk live shot about the unofficial start of summer.

It’s shaping up to be a record year for Memorial Day weekend travel, and Muntean is reviewing factors affecting air traffic such as weather, airfares, and the sinkhole that has closed Runway 4/22 at New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA). He won’t cover all these topics on air, but live shots are dynamic, and he has to be prepared.

“It’s kind of like being a pilot,” he says. He thinks of live shot planning like a map, with waypoints he knows he needs to cross, but he has to be ready to adapt. “If you’re overly scripted, you give yourself more opportunity to mess up.”

Muntean seems at ease. He’s seated in the camp chair he takes to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh each year, laptop open, and an earpiece dangling from the neck of his sweater. As the live broadcast time approaches, he listens awhile on the earpiece, smooths his hair, and strolls over to the security line.

And he’s live.

‘My entire world’

“My first memory of flying was in the back of my parents’ airplane,” Muntean says. “It was a Piper Lance that they used to travel, and I was kind of a spoiled kid because I thought, ‘Doesn’t every parent have an airplane? Aren’t you guys going to Disney World in the family station wagon airplane?’”

“I was kind of a spoiled kid because I thought, ‘Doesn’t every parent have an airplane? Aren’t you guys going to Disney World in the family station wagon airplane?’”Muntean’s father, Scott Muntean, learned to fly to cover a large territory for his sales job, and his mother, Nancy Lynn, fell in love with aerobatics. Lynn ultimately became an airshow pilot, and the couple owned an aviation company together.

“It was just like my entire world because it was their world,” Muntean says. When his dad died of a brain tumor at the age of 45, Muntean and his mom found purpose together in the airshow circuit.

“My mom was the singular force in my life, through my dad’s illness and cancer,” he says. “And after that, we were a pair.”

Muntean traveled the country with Lynn in her Extra 300L. Lynn would fly and Muntean would announce. He announced his first aerobatic performance at age 12.

“She would say that we were business partners and that I was the sensible one,” he says. “I don’t know if I love that looking back. It was a lot of pressure, I think, to put on a teenage boy. I was still very much a boy and things were really raw, I think, after my dad died.”

But Muntean was in his element. He loved airplanes, he was traveling with the most important person in his life, and big-name announcers like Rob Reider and Danny Clisham mentored him.

“I kind of thought that I would do that for the rest of my life. It was a naive view as a teenage boy to just run away and join the circus.”

On October 14, 2006, Muntean was announcing Lynn’s performance at the Culpeper Regional Airport (CJR) airshow in Virginia when the Extra crashed during a series of snap rolls. Lynn died from her injuries.

“When my mom crashed, it was kind of like the carpet got pulled out from under me, and I didn’t really know which way was up. I didn’t know where to go with my life. I was 18 years old at the time. I had just graduated from high school. I was going to a community college, and so I was trying to figure out where to go with life.”

Busytown

As a CNN correspondent covering aviation and transportation, Muntean says he’s here at DCA every few weeks.

“I feel like it’s kind of like being in a little Richard Scarry storybook,” he says. “I know the different players, I know the TSA agents, I know the head of TSA here, I know some tower controllers, I see my pilot friends going to KCM [known crewmember access], going to the crew checkpoint here at TSA.”

Muntean and photojournalist Nick Leimbach are back in their corner by the security line, with a vertical video to shoot for social media and some downtime before the 11 a.m. show. While they wait, a traveler whose dad used to work with Muntean spots him and approaches him for a selfie.

In physics, the “observer effect” describes how the act of observing something changes it. In news gathering, the phenomenon explains the gravity of the camera drawing travelers closer during a recording for social media and a passenger in the security line shaking his fists. At one point, a traveler in slide-on sandals and athletic shorts asks Leimbach to use his phone charger, stares at the device for a minute or so, then unplugs and wanders off to the flight information screen.

Muntean is on Day 10 of a social media detox, limiting access to social media apps on his phone with a Brick device. But disconnecting isn’t easy for a Millennial working at a multiplatform media company. He peeks at Instagram on his laptop and finds a story from his friend, airshow announcer Brittany Pyjas, who is one of the 3 million U.S. travelers flying on the airlines today: There, on a seatback screen of a fellow passenger, is Muntean on CNN. “I KNOW HIM,” Pyjas wrote.

Muntean seems to know everybody. Patty Wagstaff taught him aerobatics and kept him connected to the aviation world after his mom died. Michael Goulian is his aerobatic coach. Bill Stein is an aviation mentor. Wolf Blitzer comes to his birthday party. And he got his start in journalism because of an opportunity from fellow pilot and CNN alum Miles O’Brien.

While in college, Muntean got a call from O’Brien, a friend of a friend, inviting him to be O’Brien’s intern at CNN. When he got to CNN Center in Atlanta, he says, “I felt like I found my people. I just knew that that was what I wanted to do. Miles was doing exactly what I wanted to do, which was cover aviation, cover space, cover something that was really cool. I thought that he was sort of the expert. He was the voice on aviation. I just wanted to be Miles.”

So Muntean emulated O’Brien’s career. After graduating from the journalism program at the University of Maryland, he started in a small market, covering local news for a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, station for six years. From there he went to WUSA9 in Washington, D.C. (Muntean and Leimbach met while covering a homicide for WUSA9.) Along the way, O’Brien served as his mentor.

“I jokingly call him my TV dad,” Muntean says. “He’s been a multi-time landlord of mine. I’ve crashed on his couch when necessary, when there were gaps in my checkbook. He’s been an incredible and formative person in my life. I would not be here without him.”

Through his local news jobs, Muntean kept checking in with CNN. He got the job there in 2020, during COVID-19 shutdowns, covering “the downfall of the airlines, the rise of COVID, helping workers through the pandemic, then the uptick in travel, the vaccine rollout. There was no shortage of news in the travel and transportation space. It was quite an interesting time to start when I didn’t even know where the front door was in the building.”

Muntean covers topics including the mental health challenges facing pilots and AI being used to fly airplanes, among others. He covered the January 2025 midair collision at DCA, the Artemis launch and even has stick time in the Goodyear blimp. He likens the job of explaining aviation to the public to his role as a flight instructor.

“I’m taking people from the unknown to the known,” he says. “I take broad, pretty complex topics and break it down into things that are really simple and easy to understand.”

Full circle

Muntean S-turns down the taxiway at Warrenton-Fauquier Airport (HWY) in Virginia in his red-and-white Extra 300L. Warrenton is an aerobatic haven on the East Coast, and Muntean spends a lot of time in the aerobatic box on the southwest side of the airport.

“This is where my mom flew her first aerobatic contest, and because we lived not far from here in Annapolis, Maryland, she would come here and practice all the time,” he says. “And so it’s a very sort of special and sentimental place to me. It’s kind of sacred airspace in a way. And all my buds are here.”

Taking off from Runway 15, Muntean proceeds to the aerobatic box. After about 1,600 hours in an American Champion Super Decathlon, Muntean bought the Extra on March 13 and has flown it about 60 hours in the two and a half months since. He has been competing in the Intermediate category for aerobatics, and he hopes to move up to Advanced next year.

“I hope that I put in my time, you know,” he says. “I always felt like I wasn’t quite ready for an Extra because I felt like the Super D had more to teach me.”

Muntean demonstrates wingovers and a ballistic roll, and now we’re circling gently as he reflects on his path back to this hallowed block of airspace in the mid-Atlantic.

His 2001 Extra 300L is only two serial numbers off from the one his mother flew. Muntean thinks the airplanes may have come to the States in the same shipping container from Germany. And like Lynn’s Extra, it’s red and white.

“The resonance was too strong,” he says. “It was just necessary. And so, I called the bank. Put my money where my mouth was, sort of, and just did it.”

The airplane is one way Muntean keeps his mother’s memory alive. And last year, Muntean organized an aerobatic competition at Warrenton in her memory.

“She had a huge joie de vivre, a big zest for life, and she was a big personality, and I wish everyone could have met her,” he says.

Muntean is getting married at the Warrenton Airport in October, the weekend of the Culpeper Air Fest just a few miles away. It will be 20 years since Lynn’s crash.

“It’s sort of poetic in a lot of ways…. I think we’re sort of ripping the band-aid off on that date and replacing it with a new one. You can’t wear the black arm band forever.”

Where we’ve been

“You know, aviation was very much my parents’ thing when I was a kid,” says Muntean, sitting on the wing of the Extra after the flight. “And I think I liked airplanes more than I liked flying. And now I think I like flying more than I like airplanes. And now aviation is very much my thing. And I feel like I’ve sort of charted my own path in it.”

Still, Muntean says he carries his parents with him every time he flies.

“Even though aviation has caused a lot of loss in my life.… I don’t know if I would try to wipe the slate clean of those experiences. I think that we’re all a combination of what we have learned and where we’ve been. And I’m grateful that all of that has brought me to here.”

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