BJT’s Randy Padfield and Mark Phelps win journalism awards

Randy Padfield, BJT’s first editor, has been named the 2016 winner of Helicopter Association International’s prestigious Lightspeed Aviation Excellence in Communications Award, which is part of the organization’s Salute to Excellence awards program. He will accept the award during HAI’s Heli-Expo, which will take place in Louisville, Kentucky from February 29 to March 3.

Padfield, who continues to contribute to BJT, served as editor-in-chief and COO of our parent company, AIN Publications, until his retirement at the end of 2014. Before joining AIN, where he spent 22 years, he worked as a pilot. Padfield has written four books on aviation, including Learning to Fly Helicopters, which McGraw-Hill Education reissued in an updated second edition in 2013.

Last year, Padfield was a finalist for a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Aerospace Media Awards in Paris. In 1998, also, he won a Gold Wing Award for Journalism Excellence from the National Business Aviation Association.

Speaking of the Gold Wing Award, the 2015 winner was BJT columnist Mark Phelps. The award—which he accepted at the NBAA’s annual convention in Las Vegas last November—recognizes three of his Exit columns in Business Jet Traveler: “The Brightest Side of Flying” (October/November 2014), “The Scan Before the Storm” (December 2014/January 2015), and “Crew Cuts” (April/May 2015).

This was the second Gold Wing for Phelps, an AIN Publications managing editor who also won the prize in 2005. It was also the fourth Gold Wing for BJT.

Our congratulations to Padfield and Phelps for these well-deserved awards.