Aviation Week’s 2021 Photo Contest Judges
James R. Asker retired as Aviation Week executive editor in 2017. He studied photography, among other subjects, at Rice University before becoming a reporter and occasional photographer for The Houston Post. Asker joined Aviation Week in 1989, covering space technology and science prior to becoming Washington bureau chief and managing editor. His photographs have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines.
Dana Bell has written 34 books on aviation history and is now a full-time author after a 30-year career with the U.S. government. Starting as a photo researcher with the U.S. Air Force in 1976, he moved to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 1982. 
Mitchell Koppelman has been a professional news photographer, editor and manager for more than 40 years. After a decade with United Press International, he joined Gannett as the founding director of photography for USA Today. In 1984, he joined Reuters as a founder of the Reuters News Pictures Service, taking a post as assistant news pictures editor for North America. He helped develop its online global news photo service, the first web-based digital picture and video archives, and directed development and deployment of the first digital broadcast satellite delivery of still photos in the Americas. He retired from Reuters at the end of 2020.
Tony Osborne, Aviation Week’s London bureau chief since 2012, covers European defense programs, avionics and unmanned vehicles. He is also an accomplished aviation photographer.
Lisa Caputo, Aviation Week’s award-winning director of content design, has worked at the magazine since 1990. Her responsibilities have evolved to include digital as well as print design. Previously, she worked as a graphic artist at Business Week and as a layout artist at Time magazine. Caputo is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Photo Contest Director Michael O. Lavitt is director of editorial content production for the Aviation Week Network. He guided the transition of the contest to digital photography and online entry, which quadrupled entries and drew a more international field. He joined Aviation Week in 1988 as a news editor and played a key role in the organization’s transition to a multimedia provider of aerospace news, analysis, data and intelligence.