Dallas Morning News hires Arnold to cover aviation

The Dallas Morning News business editor Paul O’Donnell sent out the following announcement to the staff:

All,

As Mike Wilson so aptly said recently, welcome pastries are far more tasty than going away cakes.

So mark your calendars for June 24, when we’ll welcome the arrival of Kyle Arnold to our newsroom as our new aviation writer. We’re really excited to land someone with Kyle’s rich business reporting experience and his passion for this beat.

Kyle is a business reporter at the Orlando Sentinel, where he’s been covering the 3 r’s — real estate, retail and restaurants — for the last five years. The day Kyle verbally accepted the job he was driving to the ultimate Florida assignment — interviewing singer Gloria Estefan about a new restaurant she’s opening at the Margaritaville Resort in Orlando. Here’s one of his tweets from that event.

Before Orlando, however, he worked at the Tulsa World and won an AP award for his work in covering the American Airlines-US Airways merger and its impact on a major maintenance facility in Tulsa.

His interest in aviation goes back even further. He grew up in Seattle in a family where Boeing was just part of daily life (his dad, mom and brother all are or have been employed by the aerospace giant). He admits to avidly reading the work of previous aviation writers Terry Maxon and Conor Shine and he knew all about the major Boeing scoop that Cary, Ariana and Dom got.

And Kyle is no stranger to Texas. His first job after graduating from the University of Washington was as a business reporter in McAllen, where he learned enough conversational Spanish to cross the border into Mexico to conduct interviews for stories.

He’s also had the good fortune of appearing on a TV game show that every journalist thinks they can own — the Wheel of Fortune. While at the Tulsa World, he auditioned and made it onto the show. You can read more about how he did here.

Kyle and his wife, Macay, and their three children (10, 5 and 2) are looking forward to their return to Texas and will likely seek advice on places to live and other things that make D-FW an attractive destination.