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John and Martha King with their Cessna 340 at San Diego’s Montgomery Field in 1978. They upgraded to a Citation 500 and later to a Dassault Falcon 10.
When the Indiana University undergrads married, they agreed theirs would be an equal partnership in every way, including careers. To accomplish the latter, the couple decided to launch a business together.
That is why, after graduating, John and Martha King often spent evenings under the hoods of parked trucks, changing oil, lubricating bearings and filling gas tanks. This—their mobile fleet service—proved such a success that the couple started selling franchises to other hopeful entrepreneurs.
Much of the pair’s growing income quickly turned into outgo to satisfy John’s lifelong yearning to fly, an aspiration that Martha came to embrace as well. After earning private pilot certificates within days of each other, the couple aviated often and bought a single-engine Piper Cherokee 140 to facilitate cross-country adventures. In 1970, they added instrument ratings as well. And then multiengine. Life was good.
But the 1973 Arab oil embargo led to skyrocketing inflation, and many businesses folded, including the couple’s. Bankrupt, but now avid pilots, they decided to try for employment in aviation until something more promising emerged.
Accordingly, the self-described “super students”—both high school valedictorians—returned to the classroom with determination and in three months earned their commercial, certified flight instructor (CFI) and ground instructor certifications. By the end of 1974, they were teaching ground school to pilot wannabes.
Unbeknownst to the Kings, they would never encounter something more promising in the half-century to follow. At its core, the original service was straightforward: spend a weekend telling and showing eager students what they needed to know to pass an FAA exam on Monday. However, they first had to entice them through mailings, reserve a motel with meeting rooms and a pool for students’ families, and then keep attendees engaged for two long days full of talks on regulations, technology and procedures.
The Kings proved adept direct-mailers and came to conduct their sessions in Western states whose long distances and thin populations helped to fill weekend rosters. As for engagement, their presentations were invariably rich with laughter, self-effacing humor, memorable and surprising anecdotes, telling imagery and lively interaction. Thanks to their aviation passion, their performances—which expanded to include commercial, instrument and CFI courses—became more polished with each of their 50 working weekends per year.
While the Kings held forth at lecterns and chalkboards, technology was advancing steadily, and they adapted video for their lectures as well. Some students suggested they put whole courses on video. The Kings resisted the idea but did create a video program for use by CFIs conducting ground schools in places outside the Kings’ territory.
Later, while they were peddling those $500 video sets at a big aviation convention in the early 1980s, their world shifted dramatically. Rather than CFIs, most video buyers were individuals planning to watch at home. It was, John says, “an aha! moment.” Their in-person seminars ended in 1984, and true to their name, the couple went on to become video royalty.
The widespread popularity of King Schools video training—delivered initially on VHS, then DVDs and now exclusively online but downloadable—is unprecedented. The company has sold millions of aviation courses, delivers 10,000 lessons daily and has helped instruct roughly half the U.S. pilot population—including this av scribe.
As a result, the Kings are among aviation’s best-known and most celebrated figures and, accordingly, have received copious well-deserved awards and accolades. Their company employs some 50 writers, editors, programmers, recording professionals and others, most working at the San Diego headquarters-studio complex.
Although still flying their Falcon 10 and adding popular videos to the more than 100 courses in their catalog—Martha’s YouTube brief on E6B Flight Computer use is nearing 400,000 views—the Kings are welcoming others, including CEO and part-owner Barry Knuttila, to assume on-camera roles.
Time’s passage and toll cannot be denied, but technology has continued its steady advance. Today, for example, artificial intelligence can reverse decades and animate a holographic pair of youngish and somehow familiar instructors to deliver valuable technical insights to aviation’s next generation. That is my imagining, not the plan, although it would be fun to watch.
For now, hearty congratulations and sincere thanks to the duo whose mastery of piloting matter and visual media have helped aviators aviate for five decades and counting.
William Garvey was editor-in-chief of Business & Commercial Aviation from 2000 to 2020.
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