An Interview with John & Martha King. From the book “Boundless Horizons Leadership, Courage and the Pursuit of Excellence”

Air Command and Staff College Class of 2025 Presents the 44th Annual Gathering of Eagles

John and Martha King are the co-founders of King Schools, a renowned provider of aviation education and training materials for pilots worldwide. With over 50 years of experience in aviation education, the Kings revolutionized pilot training by creating engaging, fun, and easy-to-understand courses that have helped countless pilots earn their certifications. From weekend in-person courses, to VHS, then DVD, and now through online streaming, the Kings are credited with teaching an average of 50,000 classes a day and 10,000 courses annually – that’s over half of the new pilots every year! The Kings, flying experts themselves, were the first and only married couple to attain every single Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) civilian category and class of FAA pilot and instructor certificates. Their innovative approach to aviation instruction, combined with their passion for making flying accessible and safe, has enshrined them in both the National and International Aviation Halls of Fame and recognition as one of the 100 Distinguished Aviation Heroes in the first century of flight.

Background

How did you two meet?

John: How did we meet? I dated Martha’s sister first and she rejected me with the words, “You’d really like my sister.” As it worked out, I really liked her sister.

Martha: This was at Indiana University. John was a sophomore, my sister’s two years older, and I was a freshman. We got married a year and a half later when I was 19 and John was 21. My parents were very upset because they thought marrying after my sophomore year almost for certain meant I wouldn’t finish school. But I did – I took summer school, and John and I graduated at the same time in 1966.

John: Martha’s father said she’s the most stubborn person he ever knew. One instance was Martha decided [in grade school] rice pudding was icky, and she wasn’t going to eat it. The nun told her, “No, you have to eat the rice pudding.” They stayed there at the cafeteria until school closed, staring at the rice pudding. And Martha didn’t eat it. When school closed, they both went in their own direction. That was the end of that incident.

The second thing about stubbornness is Martha really loves to read – really, really loves to read. That’s her form of recreation. Martha’s mother was very social. She was social in dress, social in everything she did. She was very concerned that Martha wasn’t developing socially in these high school years. Martha’s mother started limiting the amount of time and the availability of books to Martha. But Martha was going to read one way or the other, regardless of what Martha’s mother said. Martha would come home with books and hide them in the hedge then go into the house to see where her mother was. If she saw the way, she would get them out of the hedge and take them upstairs. But she had to wait till the coast was clear before she could take them upstairs. If Martha’s mother caught Martha reading a book, she’d get very upset, because she thought Martha should be social. And [John says jokingly] it’s clear that Martha didn’t develop socially. One time, Martha was reading a book at the wrong time. Martha’s mother grabbed the book, ripped it out of her hands, and just tore the book to shreds. To Martha, that would be absolute sacrilege.

Martha: That would be like burning down a church.

John: Martha’s mother just got absolutely beside herself because she was making zero headway with Martha on this reading thing. She certainly couldn’t dominate Martha. She just got nowhere with Martha, and Martha was driving her nuts by, of all things, reading.

Martha’s father had seen this little girl who refused to eat the rice pudding and refused to change her behavior one iota because her mother wanted her to. Then this guy comes along and says he wants to marry her, and Martha’s father says, “I want you to know she’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever known.” I said to him, “I already know that.” But I saw Martha not as being stubborn. I saw Martha as being very determined. I made the resolution to not get crosswise with that determination because I knew that determination was there. I made the decision we’re going to put that to our advantage. And we have. It takes respect to have that determination work out to your advantage. We’ve not gotten crosswise with each other because I made the strong determination that it would be a mistake to get involved with her determination.

It’s worked out well. I can see when her father saw this guy come along, “Oh, this guy has no idea what he’s getting into.” But I did know what I was getting into, and I think that’s one of the reasons the relationship has worked; I appreciated, respected, and admired what I got into. It’s been a great relationship. Martha has no emotional needs that get in the way of our working together. Neither one of us has. Each of us was valedictorian in our class in school, and each of us was blessed with a fine self-image. Enough to say that we were comfortable with ourselves.

Martha: Neither one of us was bothered, felt pressured by any society expectations of whether the man should always be the lead and the woman the helpmate or anything like that. Neither one of us felt that way. So, I guess you could say we were each comfortable in our own skin.

John: In a sense, my calling Martha, captain a lot, which I do at home also, is an expression of that philosophy.

How did each of you get into aviation? Can you tell a story about an early memory of flying?

John: My dad had an Aeronca Champion, which is a little rag wing aircraft. He took me flying when I was maybe three, and I remember looking out there saying, “Wow, the houses got smaller and that is just gorgeous. That’s something I want to do.” So, when I became 16 years old, I soloed. That was a defining event for me. It was an important event for me. It was 1960. I quit flying at that time because it was costing me an outrageous sum of $8 an hour, including the instructor, and I knew I had to go to college. I worked my way through college and spending $8 an hour to fly an airplane; It just seemed outrageous to me. So, I quit flying. [Note: In 2025, flying with an instructor costs an average of $200 per hour!]

When we [John and Martha] met, I talked a lot about flying and when we got married, I talked a lot about flying. I would talk incessantly about flying. She knew flying was important to me. Martha is someone who, if she knew something was important to me, she would try to make sure it happened for me. So, when we had a little bit of success in business, just a minor success, we sold the business and I said, “I want to buy an airplane.” Martha said, “Okay.” We bought an airplane. [Piper PA-28] Cherokee 140. And we learned to fly together. I might have gotten my private certificate a day before Martha did, simply because of the logistics.

Martha: Two days before. The reason was, after you got your certificate, somebody had an accident at the airport, and I had to use a different one. They had to change the schedule around because the runway was closed for a while, so we were two days apart. The interesting thing is, even though Father was in the Air Force, there was no encouragement from him for me to fly. I don’t know exactly, because we never talked about that.

John: I don’t think it ever occurred to him as a possibility.

Martha: I mean, socially, it just wasn’t something that many women did. Even though there had been Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) flying planes during the war [WWII]. But the other thing is, I think he primarily considered airplanes to be tools of war because he ran training schools during the war. I remember he was running the training command on a couple of different bases. Whenever they had a training accident, particularly a fatality, he would have to be out there and notify the family and whatever. So, as I say, he thought of airplanes more as a weapon of war.

John: It wasn’t pure joy for him. Martha went on her first solo cross-country, and it was about a maybe 50- or 60-mile trip to Richmond, Indiana.

 

Martha: We were taking turns with our flight lessons and mine was in the afternoon, and I don’t remember what time I got started, but I got to Richmond and thought I’d unwind for a little while. There were a few scattered showers around, so I dodged him and went considerably more out of the way to avoid them than I really needed to.

John: Her flight instructor and I are waiting for Martha, but there is no Martha, and she has not come back. Martha had not been trained to fly at nighttime and the instructor was very concerned that there would be an upset Martha when she got back.

Martha: Hysterical was what he [the instructor] was thinking. We had bought this Cherokee 140 to learn to fly, so it was our own airplane. We spent a lot of time when we were not actually having a lesson sitting in it learning the instrument panel. I was very comfortable with how to turn the lights on at night both inside and outside the cockpit. I’m flying back towards Eagle Creek Airport on the northwest side of Indianapolis, flying close to the main boulevard and it’s very slowly getting dark, and it is just beautiful. It is like seeing a portrait with black velvet and just stars all over. The lights slowly winked on.

John: So, we see Martha coming back with all her lights on and we see her lining up on the runway and makes a beautiful landing. She taxis out towards us, shuts down the engine, and stands up on the wing. Martha says, “That was beautiful.” And the instructor says, “See you later, John. I’m going home.” That was Martha’s first solo cross-country.

Martha: That is when I fell in love with flying. Until then I was doing it with grim determination, because John was in love with flying. He was going to fly, and I was not going to sit at home while he was out somewhere having fun. I remember my first lesson and we were at the airplane. The instructor is there, and he waves to me to go ahead and get in. I climb up on the wing and then I realized, “Wait a minute, with me on the wing and the instructor coming behind that means I’m going to be in the left seat (the pilot in command).” I started backing off the wing and saying, “I want to just ride around for a little while and see what this is all about.” Both John and the instructor said, “No! No! No! No!” John pushed me back up on the wing and pushed me into the cockpit and the instructor got in the right seat and we were off. I fell in love with flying on that first solo cross-country the one coming back at night and it was just a smooth beautiful night. I still remember what that night looked like.

John: Yes, I think my most vivid flight I can remember is my first solo. I was elated and could not believe the airplane was a tandem aircraft and the seat behind me was empty. I kept turning around and verified I didn’t have an instructor in there and I was very elated about that. I’ve never felt much anxiety about flying. I’ve always felt it was an elation. I remember that as I was blessed with a fine self-image as a teenager, and I thought I was very competent. I think flying makes you feel competent.

Business ventures

The first rule of business is never go into business with your spouse. It ruins relationships; It ruins the business. And yet, here you guys are 59 years into marriage, 50 years into a very successful business.

Martha: I don’t really believe in the saying you should never go into business with your spouse. There are risks, clearly, when you go into business with any family member, brother, parent, spouse, but depending on the relationship there can be a fantastic synergy. One of the things we found from being in this business together was that there was no case of the spouse came home from a hard day at work and the other spouse didn’t really understand what they’d been through and what was going on. We work together, come home together, and sometimes talk about it at home. We have a total understanding and empathy for what the stresses have been, or the triumphs have been for that day, that week, that month in the business.

And there are quite a few husband-and-wife partnerships in aviation. Walter and Ollie Van Beech, Bill and Moya Lear, and there’s others if I think about it a little bit that are very strong, successful relationships. I don’t know if aviation makes that easier or I just happen to be more familiar with them because of being immersed in aviation.

John: What I thought Martha would say is I think the key to our getting along with each other is mutual respect.

Martha: And communication.

John: And communication. But one time I communicated with Martha, I told her, “I respect you and I admire you.” It made her mad. I said, “What did I do wrong? Why did I make you mad?” She says, “Well, you didn’t say love in there anywhere.” I said, “Well, I’m telling you…” and I started scrambling, thinking I’ll recover. I said, “…Well, I’m trying to tell you why I love you!” But I do respect and admire Martha. I really do. I got to be careful because if I don’t get love in there soon, I get in trouble!

You approach the business as equal co-partners in everything you do. Has that always been perfect?

John: Well, we went bankrupt in our first business. But we did it without recriminations against each other. I don’t recall we had any relationship stress because of it, you?

Martha: No, we didn’t. There was never any case of, “Well, you shouldn’t have done that.” It’s hard to say exactly how we get to consensus. It has a little bit to do with which one of us has more emotional investment, more passion about a particular course to take. And a little bit about which one of us is trying to mitigate, analyze and mitigate, the potential risks that we see. But we’ve never had a situation where one of us is taking a course of action that basically tramples over the opinions of the other. We have enough communication and respect that we come to, if necessary, a compromise on how we approach something. But we’ve never had it where one of us is doing something and the other is just sitting there seething or resentful. That’s not happened.

John: No, it’s not happened. One of our lines is, “Failure is wasted unless you take responsibility for it.” If you don’t go back and say, “We messed up here,” you’re giving up a good failure. You’re losing the benefit of it.  I believe a thing that’s worked well in our favor is neither one of us has the need to be more important than the other. Both of us, and I think Martha in particular, has what we call a high emotional quotient [also known as emotional intelligence or EQ] as well as an intellectual quotient. So, Martha doesn’t need to be the top dog, and I don’t need to be the top dog. We work hard to express that.

You have an aircraft that has to be flown by two pilots. Do you think that that helps in your relationship or is it more of an end result of the relationship, to be co-equals it naturally just makes sense to have a plane that requires two pilots?

John: It’s both.

Martha: I was going to say exactly that, it’s both. First of all, we really enjoy the partnership involved in becoming a good team, working together, each having a clearly defined role in the airplane. And it’s just a lot of fun to share those roles; the teamwork in flying it well. The other aspect is flying an airplane that requires two pilots and going through really good training. We bought the [Cessna] Citation 500 we flew before the [Dassault] Falcon 10 in 1987. It also required two pilots. So, for 37 years we’ve been flying airplanes that require two pilots. We’ve been taking annual simulator training with Flight Safety [International] who does a fantastic job of really working on your skills, communication skills, and roles in the cockpit and two cockpit crew, because that makes a huge improvement in the safety record.

That has helped us a lot. A lot of that crew resource management translates to business, to a marriage, because what they emphasized is what we’ve been talking about—respect and communication between the two crew members. That’s how you do things with minimal friction and maximum situational awareness. So, we’ve taken that same concept, and we’ve applied it to business talks we give. We frequently had people at the end of those talks say, “You should do a marriage counseling business and cover this with it.” I mean, it’s applicable everywhere in life.

John: We gave a talk together in Saudi Arabia. I think both of us were invited in part because they knew we were going to talk about our relationship and how we worked well together. That would be unusual in Saudi Arabia, of course.  The person who invited us was a prince, and a strong sponsor of aviation. We gave the talk, and then the next day, some guy came to me and he says, “Well, I hardly got any sleep at all last night.” He says, “My wife saw your talk and all she would do, she didn’t want to sleep, she just wanted to talk about how exciting that concept [a co-equal relationship] was to her.”

Martha: Which would be quite different than the usual social relationships and family relationships in Saudi Arabia.

John: I suspect that the prince, by inviting us, took a personal risk. They’ve invited us again this year, but we’re going to send a video.

I’m sure in the cockpit there’s times where you don’t agree. How do you handle that?

Martha: Well, the captain’s the captain, so they have the final decision. But the co-pilot has the responsibility of respectfully bringing up any situational awareness or risk management issues that they think are significant and articulating them clearly to the captain.

John: You have policies. The captain has an obligation to solicit input, and the co-pilot has an obligation to give that input respectfully. When I’m co-pilot, I can give facts, but I cannot give my opinion. For instance, I can say, “Martha, below glide slope, sink 1,000.” But what I can’t say is, “Martha, you’re too damn low.” I can’t give my opinion, I can’t say, “You’re too damn low,” but I can say, “You’re below glide path and sink is 1,000 or 2,000” or whatever.

Martha: And the only acceptable response from the captain is, “Correcting,” or “Here’s what I’m going to do next and how this is going to work out.” Communication again.

John: What you’re not allowed to say is, “It’s okay.” If the co-pilot’s concerned, you have to respond to that.

Martha: Flight Safety has a strong emphasis on certain things in the cockpit are procedural. It’s standard operating procedure (SOP) and you just have to do those things. But once you know you have to do a particular thing, like get stabilized before you reach a certain point on final, the issue of how you get to that position and stabilize is more technique. Because John and I have slightly different styles, we sometimes have to restrain ourselves a little bit about, “Well, he’s going to get there, but he’s not getting there the way I would have gotten there. So, keep your mouth shut because he’s going to get there.” This is a matter of technique, not a matter of safety. There’s learning there. I won’t say that we haven’t had short periods where we’ve just had to talk with each other about how should we express this, what kind of language should we use, when, to make it respectful, but yet also, if there’s a real problem, say something. I mean, life isn’t perfect, and communication isn’t always perfect either. They both take work.

John: It is in the cockpit. We call the one in the left seat who is in charge of the airplane captain. Tell her the Bob Wagstaff story.

Martha: Oh, yeah. Because this wasn’t always as good as it is now.

John: Bob Wagstaff was Patty’s [Patty Wagstaff, 2023 Eagle] husband. We said, “We’re arguing in the airplane.” He says, “Well, I can fix that for you.” I said, “Oh no, we’ve been doing this for too long. Martha is a very stubborn person.” I was told that very early on. “And you’re not going to fix this for us.” He says, “No, I can fix that for you. I can fix it with one word.” And I said, “Okay, well, what’s the word?” He says, “The word is captain. If you have some input you want to make, address her with respect and call her captain. Because when you use the word captain, that says ‘I acknowledge you have the authority, and I acknowledge that authority. I’m not going to try and take it away from you.’ So, the use of the word captain says that right off.” Bob continued and said, “You have to give the input respectfully. It has to be appropriate, and it must be accepted by the captain.”

Martha: Part of what he said was the other obligation, the copilot has got the obligation say captain and be very respectful and factual on the input, not opinionated. But the captain, by accepting that title, has to also accept the responsibility to accept input, to take it seriously, and to respond appropriately to it. That was really life-changing for us. That started in the Cessna 340, partway through our flying on that. We’re both strong, confident people. We’re both flight instructors. We’re both equally rated in any of the airplanes we fly. And sometimes that could be an interesting combination in the cockpit. Early on in the 340 we had some head-butting over what we ought to do and what the technique ought to be and so on. Bob Wagstaff’s approach fixed probably 90 percent of that.

John: Absolutely. He did fix it with one word. He said he was going to fix it with one word, and he did. That was the start of our crew resource management program. Bob helped us design these rules for crew resource management. That’s why Bob was a good friend.

Martha: Then flight safety really hammered it home with the crew resource management. I think the takeaway from Bob’s input and flight safety’s input is you need to be focused on the outcome you’re looking for, accept all relevant and respectful input, and anyone around needs to give respectful and appropriate factual input. Then the captain makes the decision, because you can’t have people fighting over the controls, whether that’s literally physically in the airplane or whether that’s in a command situation. Somebody’s got to be in charge and make the decisions with appropriate input and ideas from other people. Staying focused on the results you’re trying to get and the best way to get there while minimizing the risks that are inevitable in whatever operation, whether it’s flying, business, military operations, whatever it may be.

When our employees fly with us, they think it’s amusing. When they first fly with us, they are a bit puzzled by it but then understand a relationship that around the business is very casual—“John, Martha, what do you think about this.”—becomes very formalized and structured when we get into the cockpit. Because that’s the way it needs to be in that situation, to have very clear-cut roles, and we each understand what we’re contributing to the success of the flight, of the operation. And they’re surprised the first time they’re there. We have headsets at every passenger seat in the airplane, so everyone can hear our interactions with each other and air traffic control (ATC) and so on.

John: It’s part of our philosophy if you work for King Schools, it’d be cruel and unusual punishment to be in the back and not hear what was going on with the headsets. So, we give everybody headsets, everybody hears everything we’re saying, and so we tend to be formal.

Martha: Well, we are formal whether anyone else is in the cockpit or not. We are formal because that promotes the roles we need to be operating in to have a successful flight. It promotes clear communication and respectful conversations. But they find it funny to begin with when they hear us addressing each other as captain, co-pilot, and being very formal and structured in what we say because we’re not that structured around the business.

John: It could look like an act, but it’s not an act. It’s genuine. Martha and I have strong beliefs about authenticity. Openness is a part of who we are. You’re open to each other and the company. You’re open to your customers, and you are what you hold yourself out to be. That’s an important part of who we are.

 

Do you use the same concept in your relationship outside the cockpit?

John and Martha together: Yes.

John: I guess we agree on that. You demonstrate respect to the other person in the way you make comments and criticisms, and you make valid and important comments and criticisms. You don’t pick on little things. We work hard at giving each other respect.

Martha: Even in things like driving a car, there’s different techniques about how we get from point A to point B. Procedurally, we’ve got to get from here to there, but there will be different techniques in driving. Every once in a while, one will say to the other, “I’m not comfortable with the speed, or I’m not comfortable with how close you are to the car in front, or I’m not comfortable with whatever.” The other one normally says, “Okay, I’ll fix it.” Because part of the goal is not to be right, but to have everyone comfortable with what’s occurring. That’s a high value.

John: I think neither one of us has to be right.

Martha: Neither one of us, and I don’t know whether it’s insecurity that causes it in people generally, but neither one of us has a need to come out on top to win when we’re having a discussion or a situation. It’s not a case of winning. It’s a case of coming up with the right outcome and whatever tools you need. We’ve learned a lot of good tools from aviation that we apply to both business and to our interpersonal relationship that help as far as keeping the focus on what outcome do you want, and how do you get there best with the least amount of risk, whether it’s physical risk or emotional risk, whatever that might be.

When you both started dating, it was not the norm for females to be in aviation. But from the beginning of your relationship that seems to be a null issue for you. Has it ever been an issue publicly?

John: My mom and dad owned a gas station and a coffee shop. She ran the restaurant, and he ran the gas station. I saw my mom as a partner. And I think a lot of it… I had that role model.

Martha: I think it’s also personality. From the get-go, an open personality. One of the things I have determined to not allow to happen in life is if people see a man and a woman, they tend to go to the man and assume he’s the captain. So, they see us come out of the front of the aircraft, even though Martha was in the left front seat, they see us come out and they tend to come to me and ask how much fuel I want and so on. I say, “Well, I don’t know, let’s ask the captain.” I say, “Captain, how much fuel do you want?” It’s just cultural bias.

John: Yeah, it disorients them when you do that. She’s an idol of that. I mean, she’s done all the hard work to get there that I have done and every license and rating we’ve got equally. Nobody does it for you, you do it on your own. And she’s done all of that on her own.

Martha: But an interesting observation is when they come to John to ask for fuel, even though I’m the one that flew in, that bothers John a lot more than it bothers me.

John: That’s part of the success of it, Martha is not touchy about it. I’m the one that’s touchy. I’m more protecting of Martha’s rights than Martha is. Is that a fair statement?

Martha: I would agree to that. It’s probably because John and I got married so young and we’ve always been partners both in business and in aviation. I have never felt like I know people who legitimately have any significant discrimination based on gender. That, I’m sure, is probably in part because we come as a package. If they want to talk to John, they have to include me because he makes sure of that. But I haven’t had to fight and claw my way and push my way into a position of respect. Again, that’s partly because we come as a package. That’s partly because we both do the same thing. We’re both teaching the two-day ground schools. We both do the video. We both run the company together. It bothers me a little bit when women come to me and see me as the role model for how they should go for success because I recognize I’ve not had to struggle with gender bias in the way many women have, whether it’s military, business, or whatever. So, I feel, oddly enough, a little guilty about that because I recognize that I’ve not shared their struggle in the same way.

John: But she is competent. I mean, she performs. The other thing is, Martha, when we were dating, along the lines that I respected her and admired her, one of the things I saw is she was a problem solver and a very competent person. I told her when we were dating that those were the things I liked about her and I thought it was a nice bonus that she was female and I was male, but that was just a bonus as far as I was concerned; that she’s female is not the essence of who Martha is. She’s an achiever, a problem solver, and a high EQ person. That is the essence of who Martha is… I might have left something out there. That’s our partnership. Martha has been an equal partner in everything we’ve done. It’s incidental that she’s female. It’s a bonus and I’m not going to deny the bonus. You almost feel that way about flying an airplane also, don’t you? In the sense that it’s incidental that you’re female.

Martha: It’s irrelevant. Patty Wagstaff said, “I’ve never met an airplane that could tell the difference [between a male and female pilot].”

You’ve mentioned a couple of times about this previous business. Did you all start out as business majors looking to do your own business?

John: We knew we needed to be partners if we were going to be entrepreneurs. We knew we were going to be in our own business because we thought it unlikely General Motors would hire us as equal partners. Our goals were financial rather than creating a lifestyle together with the first business. One of the reasons why it broke is financial… I don’t think they were good goals, and they didn’t work for us. We really didn’t like the business. When you don’t like the business and hard times come along, you aren’t willing to persist. You aren’t willing to persist through hard times.

Martha: John had seen the model of his father and mother working together in a small business as partners. He liked that and liked the control over your lifestyle that gave. You [John] were an accounting major at Indiana University. People are surprised at this, but my major was comparative literature, which took in a lot of variety of courses and Indiana University, like any other, had a set of core courses on literature and English and history and so on. Comparative literature incorporated many of those core courses into the courses for the major because they related to how the literature of the world compared historically over time and so on. That left me with a lot of electives I could do, and I never really added it up, but John says when we graduated, I actually had more accounting courses than he did.

John: My major was accounting, and I have a degree in accounting, yet she had more accounting than I did. Along the same line, she would say, “I’d like you to take this course with me.” So, I took a lot of courses with her. I enjoyed it, and that’s part of the deal, I was willing to share that stuff with her, willing to put effort into our relationship and the intellectual part of our relationship.

Martha: We both have always liked to learn, and so we enjoy studying new airplanes, new categories and classes of airplanes, new business principles, direct marketing, video. We’ve just enjoyed learning new things like that together. It’s interesting that I, coming out of a military family, which is much more traditional in the, back then, male-female roles. Now, of course, it’s a bit different on gender. I didn’t have any feeling that that’s the way it should be, and I can’t really explain that particularly, other than I just felt like I could do whatever I wanted to.

John: And it’s true, you could.

Martha: Well, with you.

John: Part of my deal was it would be a huge waste to not take full advantage of that. Martha’s a problem solver and a planner. That makes her a good pilot because she thinks about risk management in advance. Part of our relationship is intellectual companionship. I recognize what I’ve got here, and I’m going to make sure that I’m a participant in that.

What was the first business?

John: It was a lubrication service, and it first started out as a fueling service for truck fleets, and the owners of the truck fleets said to us, “You know, it’s nice to have the trucks fueled because we don’t have to take them out of service to get them fueled, but what would really help us is if you would do a lubrication service ”

Martha: We’d come around with a fuel truck and fuel them at night, so they didn’t have to go to the service station. Filling them with gas didn’t take all that long but taking them down for oil changes and lubrication was much more time-consuming.

John: What it meant was they didn’t have to be taken out of service for it, and they could keep them in operation. If you take the truck out of service, you take the people out of service. It was beautiful. But we didn’t like it. We did it because I grew up in the gas station business. I knew how to do lubrication services, and I had all the technical skills, but neither one of us was passionate about it.

Martha: We started that while we were still in school at Indiana University and built it up to reasonable size and then wanted to start franchising the concept. We sold the first business unit to somebody in Indianapolis, and that’s when we bought the Cherokee 140 and learned to fly.

John: Then we started establishing franchises. We had about 50 franchises when we went bankrupt when we had the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo in the early ‘70s. We were very naive kids. We had not designed the business well. If you sell franchises in the restaurant business, normally you would own the real estate the franchisee is in. But we didn’t own anything. We had no way to enforce they pay us their franchise fee, their license fees. During the OPEC oil embargo, the 50 franchises got together and said, “We’re not going to pay the Kings anymore.” They all withheld their money, and we ran out of money. Generally, you go bankrupt not because you aren’t making a profit. You go bankrupt because you don’t have any cash. And that’s what happened. We went bankrupt because they withheld their funds.

Martha: You could say, if you were in the mood, that, “Well, we were doing fine, but it was the OPEC oil embargo that made us go bankrupt.” But we looked at that and said a lot of companies made it through that. We didn’t, and why didn’t we? We came up with we just didn’t design the business properly, and that’s on us, not on them. That’s how we came up with the saying that failure is wasted if you don’t take responsibility for it.

After that bankruptcy, we decided to just do something for the fun of it until a serious business came along. We said, “Well, we really love flying.” We each had done some teaching in school, and we enjoyed that, “So, let’s put it together and do two-day, weekend ground school classes.” When we started, we only had enough money to put up posters on local FBOs [Fixed Base Operators] and hoped they had some students that would want to take it. We were doing classes of three, four, five, maybe six people if it was good, and we would share the income with the Fixed Base Operator that let us use their meeting room to run the classes. We made enough doing that.

We had one big flight school here in San Diego that came to us in 1975 and said, “We’ve got a lot of people that want to fly on their VA benefits, but we can’t get them through the ground school. We know you’re teaching these two-day classes. Could you teach our school, our ground school?” At first, we thought they wanted us to do like one or two nights a week for eight weeks because that’s what everybody else was doing, and we didn’t want to do that. They said, “We don’t care how you do it as long as you get them through the FAA knowledge test.”

So, we did the two-day ground schools with them, and they provided us a lot of students. That’s what financed our ability to begin sending out mailers to people in the western part of the country. We would have classes in Billings, Montana; Spokane, Washington; Boise, Idaho; places that had a lot of distance so an airplane would really be valuable but not a big enough population to really support a good regular ground school even if it did at the nearest metropolitan area. A lot of the people out there would be on ranches maybe a hundred miles away. Driving in two nights a week for eight weeks, a hundred miles each way, was not very appetizing for them. We’d come in for a weekend and try to get someplace like a Holiday Inn with the indoor swimming pool so they could bring their family in. The kids enjoy the pool. The spouses go shopping a little and the pilot, who were almost always men in those days, would come to the class, take two days, and [we’d] give the FAA exam on Monday morning and get it all done.

There were a fair number of those people, particularly in Alaska but also in places like Montana and western Washington that were flying their own airplanes off their own strip on their own ranch to a friend’s ranch or other places on their own ranch and they had airplanes in use for them and not much use for the FAA. They’d see my airplane, my strip, my ranch. What’s the FAA got to do with it? So, when we came along and made it easy, a lot of them got legal. They were very mechanically, physically oriented people. They weren’t having any trouble with the physical flying, just the rules.

John: They would one day decide, “Well, I think I’ll go into Fairbanks.” They’d go into Fairbanks and couldn’t talk to the tower. Didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to fly a pattern, and would get a certificate violation against them because they flew in.

You’ve certainly had a lot of success, success that you didn’t predict when you started out teaching. How did that conversation go when you had to officially declare bankruptcy with your first business?

John: Well, at the time, you owe a lot of money. First of all, it’s really a sad thing for the people you owe money to, because when you declare bankruptcy, what you’re trying to do is be relieved from that debt. You want the relief from your debt, and you’re appreciative of the rule that says you can be relieved from your debt, because we had a future that we weren’t going to see our way out of.

Martha: We had, at that point, several other stockholders in the business, and one of them was attempting to take the business away from us in the middle of all of this financial distress. We went to a lawyer, laid out the situation, and said, “How do we stop this guy from taking the business away from us?” There was a long pause, and the lawyer said, “Why in the world are you trying to prevent him from taking it away from you? Because if you prevent him, then you’re going to be left trying to administer all of this. I don’t think it’s going to survive based on what you’re saying, so why would you want to prevent him from wresting a failing business away from you?” And that kind of triggered.

Actually, he’s [The man trying to take over the company] the one that ended up filing the bankruptcy papers. He thought he knew what to do to run it, and he could manage better than we could. When you’re down, everybody thinks you’re stupid. We ended up taking personal bankruptcy ourselves, but he was the one who filed bankruptcy [for the company].

John: Another thing is when you’re up, you’ve got to be careful because you think you’re smart, and when you’re down, you think you’re stupid. We now think we’re smart, and we’ve got to be careful. We’ve gotten better at running our business, of course, through the years. When the first business went bankrupt, we said, “Well, that hurt. Let’s not do that anymore, and let’s do something for the fun of it until a serious business comes along.” We’ve been in this business now for 50 years and still haven’t found a serious business. So, we’re doing it for the fun of it now. We have a passion for it.

Looking forward at that point, did you see a potential future? What was that feeling?

John: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Martha: Not this, no way. [It was] Depressing.

John: Yeah, we were careful not to blame each other.

Martha: Yes, but we had to work at it. You feel like a huge failure, and you feel guilty because of the people you made deals with… The biggest creditors, we were buying vans for a dealership and modifying them to put lubrication and oil change equipment in the vans, and then reselling it to the franchisees, and we owed the dealership for not a big number of vans, but some number. You know they’re not all that big a company either, and it’s going to hurt them.

John: You feel you’re not competent, not only do you feel down personally, but you also feel very guilty about it.

King Schools started out as, we’ll do this until we find something. What point was King Schools the answer? In other words, when did you realize there probably wasn’t another business for you, that you were going to continue teaching?

Martha: Probably when we went to video. It started out as a job that will be pleasant, and we’ll get an income to live on while we think about what happens next.

John: Well, when it started making more money than anything else we could have done. We were looking for things we could do for a living and support ourselves, and teaching ground schools was it. As we got along, we started getting better at marketing our ability to do ground schools, and we were just trying to solve that problem–doing something for somebody that they’ll pay for. Finding the customer need or want you can fulfill profitably.

To teach on a weekend, you have to be very good because you’re going to teach on set. We would show up on Friday night, set up the classroom, Martha would teach in one classroom on Saturday, I teach in another classroom, and we teach again on Sunday. Then on Monday, we make a room available to give the testing. You had to get the whole two-day curriculum done in one weekend on Saturday and Sunday, you’ve got like 30, 40, 50 people in there, and you’ve got to be efficient and get it done. If you start off on a subject wrong, you realize you have blank looks on their faces, and you think you have 50 idiots in there. Then you realize there’s only one. So, we had to get good at starting off and making it logical and making it make sense. We learned to make up things that help people remember, like, “If you’re on a runway or a taxiway and you see a black square with a J in it, you’re on Taxiway Juliet.” And so, “Black square, you’re there.” We made up things that people could remember, and they could use in the airplane or use on a test. We had the talks well-polished, and they were really very good and very effective.

When we went to video, the video worked. We had a tone on the video that was personal, and people felt we were talking personally to them. It worked for them. That’s why it was successful. Or at least we think it was. Now when people meet us, they feel we personally helped them do something that was very important to them. When you learn to fly, it means the world to you. When you help someone do something they wanted to do that’s very important to them, you’ve done something good for them. So, we get that feeling when someone meets us, it’s personal. It’s as if they know us personally.

Martha: When we first put the courses on video, it was strictly for the purpose of teaching our own classes, so we didn’t have to stand up in front for like 12 hours each of the days. In this particular class in Fairbanks, somehow between the airport and the hotel, some of the stuff came out of the bed of the truck, and we lost the videotapes for the class. We had to stand up and do it all live again ourselves. We had gotten used to using the videos, and you said, “I don’t want to be a 40-year-old ground instructor.” I don’t know if you remember that.

John: I remember the feeling.

Martha: That’s what triggered us to look at selling the tapes to flight instructors for teaching in areas particularly that we couldn’t get to. That’s what really started us into thinking, “What can we do to have the business be a business and something other than just our labor as we show up at different locations?” So, that’s what really kicked off the push to sell it to other flight instructors and then to sell the tapes to consumers and actually turn it into a business rather than just a job.

John: One time we had the video in front of the classroom and someone came to me afterwards and says, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” but he says, “I like it on the video a lot more than you personally, because on the video, apparently when you made the video, you were rested and you were good, but you’re obviously tired now and you’re not doing as good a job as you did on the video.” People come in occasionally and see us, see the building, and see the video studio and they say, “Wow, you have a great business here.” It’s weird because that annoys us. The reason it annoys us is the building isn’t a business. The TV studio is not a business. Employees aren’t a business. They don’t understand what a business is. Martha and I, because of having been bankrupt and been broke and not broke—we like not broke a lot better, by the way—we have opinions about what a business is. To us, a business is the identification of a customer need or want you can fulfill for them profitably. You can make a profit doing something good for them. Because you really have to be doing good for people or they won’t be paying you. They won’t buy things from you. We learned we could find a person we could do a ground school for, get enough of them together, and because we learned to do direct marketing, we could do it profitably. We wound up with a business where we could get 30 or 40 people in the room because we learned direct marketing and do well at it. We had as many as 100 people in the room a lot of times.

One of the things when we talk about business talk, we talk about what we call Scrabble letters. Scrabble letters are things you have learned you know more about than most people know, you can put these things together, and they help you identify a customer need or want you can fulfill profitably. The more Scrabble letters you have, the more you’re going to be able to find a business because you’re going to put things together that work.

Martha: Or enhance the business you have. A lot of times you don’t really know what you’re going to do with something you learn. You learn it because it’s interesting and you may or may not see any application in whatever occupation or business you’re doing right then. But then time goes on and all of a sudden you see how something you learned back then fits into what you’re doing now and gives you some insights or knowledge.

In Scrabble you pull seven tiles, but they’re face down and you don’t know what you’re pulling. You only get seven and you’re trying to make high value words out of combining those seven for the board game of Scrabble. But in life, these areas of interest that John talked about are your letters and the difference is in the game of Scrabble for life you get to have as many letters as you want. You’re not limited to seven and you get to pick which ones you want to have. It’s not a blind, “Here’s what you get. You get to pick what those are going to be.” You’ve got a lot more so, you get a lot more flexibility and opportunity in the Scrabble of life than in the Scrabble board game to combine things. The whole point is to make life better for whatever community you’re involved in. Whatever people you relate to. Whatever community you’re involved in. Because doing good things for other people is what helps you get ahead.

John: That’s the secret of life is you do good things for other people. And for instance, let’s take a look at what John and Martha’s Scrabble letters are. Our first Scrabble letter is a passion. A passion for flying. But you can’t make any money because you have a passion for flying. You have to do something for somebody. So, our second Scrabble letter is we learn to teach flying. If you combine teaching and flying now you have a chance of making some money. Our third Scrabble letter was we became students of direct mail, learned everything we could about direct mail. Our next Scrabble letter was video. We learned to put our courses on video. Now we could ship ourselves off in a box and we could teach them in their living rooms or in their kitchens.

Martha: We could scale it, and it wasn’t just limited to places we could go with our own time and energy.

John: You add those up and every Scrabble letter multiplies your business.

Martha: Right. We got into video in ‘83-84 and we bought the Citation 587. It moved the decimal point over for us (financially). No question about that. Then the next Scrabble letter was computerized delivery of our courses as opposed to on VHS tapes. First on CDs and then on DVDs on computers. In whole, what we were chasing, which was not easy back then, was full screen, smooth video. You could get it in a little box but that wasn’t very impactful.

John: We learned to be able to play video on computers when we walked by a store and they had a computer playing the video we wanted to do. We went in and bought the computer.

Martha: And we took it back to the office, handed it to our then president and said, “We want you to reverse engineer this and fix it so we can make our videos play full screen on computers.” That [computer video] was a Scrabble letter and after that we went to internet delivery and then internet marketing and both the delivery and the marketing made it. The internet made it much easier for students and eliminated a lot of issues. When we were delivering the courses on CDs and DVDs they had to install the program on their own laptop and as you probably know every computer has different drivers and all kinds of conflicts. We had constant phone calls and a big support staff trying to work out what was the problem with our program or was the problem with their operating system, what drivers did they have for the printer, and all this kind of stuff. But when we were delivering it online, it resided on our servers, and they just accessed our servers and took it on the internet. That solved an enormous number of problems.

John: There’s a principle of multiplication that says if you start with a penny and you double it, you have two cents and then double it again and you have four cents. If you keep doubling thirty times you have a million dollars. That’s what happens every time you add a Scrabble letter, you’re doubling the business, you double the possibilities. We realized within a couple years of going into video we were teaching equal to half the pilots in the United States learning to fly. We weren’t trying to get wealthy. We were trying to solve problems. You got the problem of shipping videotapes, we had 300 VCRs duplicating videotapes, and a staff of people playing videotapes, we had semi-trucks come in with videotapes and you’d take those videotapes upstairs and pretty soon the semi would go out with videotapes. We were moving a lot of physical product around. Now we have our computers downstairs and we’re transferring bits and bytes, we’re transferring electrons that don’t weigh anything, they don’t have to be packaged.

Martha: They are immediately accessible. People can buy the courses now and start taking it within five minutes.

John: They don’t have to install it, it plays on our machines, and the internet connection allows it to play wherever they are. If we’re going to sell something that’s in Germany they’ll have computers that store our courses in Germany…

Martha: …so there’s not a delay factor as far as the videos are loaded, and we have those all over the world…

John: … and also in other parts of the United States. If we go on the east coast somebody will take it and it’s no delay and so on because we’re storing the videos all over the place so it’s all of those little problems we solved let us double the business and we just kept doubling pretty soon if you keep doubling a penny 30 times…

Martha: …you get a million. We haven’t had 30 doublings yet so…

John: I’ll bet we have, but in any event it’s why we’re smelling jet fuel. We didn’t really set out to make a lot of money this time. We set out to do what we enjoyed doing.

Martha: When we first started selling the videos to other flight instructors to use for their classes and we had mailed to all of the flight instructors in the country over a period of about four months and figured we were done. The San Diego direct marketing club had a direct marketing symposium they were going to have, and I said to John, “You know, we’re getting into direct marketing, I think maybe we should go to this,” and I forget what the cost of it was.

John: It was something like $1,200 and I said, “That’s too much money, I don’t think we want to go.” Martha says, “Well, I’m going.”

Martha: So, I went, and he didn’t, and that’s how we solved the conflict. I came back and I said, “This direct marketing guy had a seminar about mailings and he said, ‘If you send out a successful mailing and it’s successful enough that you can take a 30 percent decrease in the gross sales and still make a profit, you can successfully mail out the identical mailer, exactly, no change, the next month.’”

John: We were mailing every flight instructor in the country.

Martha: We thought we were done because we had already been through the list [FAA used to keep a list of all the certified pilots and instructors]. I came back and said to John, this guy says we can mail that same list again. The instructor said every month, but we’d take that list and split it into quarters, so it’ll be four months when they get it the first time and the next time. It was hugely successful. For three, four, five years we did that, just mailing the same flight instructors, same group every four months and producing really good results every single time. That’s what really put us on the map as far as marketing is concerned and from there, we went into selling the tapes to consumers. We also had a policy from the very first course we did to have a response device. We had postcards in the original course books, and we asked for scores and what question numbers they missed because the FAA used to publish the questions, and you could find out what topics they were missing and beef up the teaching on it if there was a consistent issue. We also asked if they had any other suggestions, and we’d pay attention. The suggestions were like, John talks too fast, Martha’s a little droney. We worked on those and pretty well took care of them.

We were used to listening to what our customers said. At the point when we were selling the tapes to flight instructors to run their own two-day ground schools with, we got a booth at [Experimental Aircraft Association] AirVenture, still called Oshkosh back then, to sell to flight instructors who were attending. As we talked to people who came to the booth and were buying the tapes, we realized most of the people buying the tapes, $500 a set, which was a lot of money back in the mid-80s, were using it for their own personal use, not to teach or to make money with. It was just because that was to them the best way to do the ground school, even though it was a $500 fee. We looked at that, and John said, “This is telling us something. We should make a consumer version of the program and sell it to consumers.” I said, “We can’t do that because it will cut off our flight instructor sales, we’ll have to cut the price on those, and that’s where our money is coming from right now.”

John said, “No, trust me, this is going to be a big deal.” We made a slightly different version of the course for the flight instructors. Each topic, weather, regulation, and so on, would be a tape of its own, and for the consumers, we just ran it all together so that when weather quit, regulation started. We put some magazine ads in, and I was still saying to John, I don’t think this is a good thing to do. but John was very comfortable with it, and so we did it, and that was really booming the…

John: …decimal point over. We became the biggest advertisers in general aviation. We bought first a black and white page, they called it our Clyde ad, because it featured our friend Clyde who was sitting at his computer taking a course.

Martha: We called it industrial strength, but it had all of the things our study said a direct marketing ad should have. It had a strong headline, it had a picture of the product in use, and so industrial strength, but very successful.

John: And a response method and so on, but it wasn’t very fancy. Then we bought a single-color page, it cost twice as much to buy in color and sold at least twice as much.

Martha: Then we went to a two-page color spread.

John: They owned both left and right pages, they were color, and that was also twice as expensive as one-color page. We had spreads in every aviation magazine we could find, and it was just a case of solving puzzles. One of the things that we believe is that you get ahead by taking care of three groups of people. You obviously have figured out what the needs of your customers are, and you’ve figured out how to solve those needs. So, you’re taking care of your customers.

The next group of people you need to take care of is the people who devote their lives to you. We’ve got people who have worked for us for 40 years. We’ve been their entire working lives. Everything they know has to do with us, and we owe a tremendous obligation. One of the things I’ve learned is to try and be kind. We had an employee, a gal, who wanted to bring her bicycle into her office, and for some reason I didn’t want her to do that. I said, “No.” She wept, and she wailed, and she cried, and then she quit the company. Two weeks later she got killed in an automobile accident. I thought, “Oh my, I didn’t want that for her. It’s a terrible thing.” Now we have an employee who wants to bring his bicycle into his office, and fine, no problem. It doesn’t cause any damage. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I objected to it. Maybe 30 years ago. Then I gradually realized they’re all going to die. I owe an obligation to be kind to them and not make arbitrary rules. So, we work hard at that now. We believe that it’s our obligation, our moral obligation to provide meaningful and rewarding work in an atmosphere of civility and respect. About the only way you can get fired at King Schools now is not provide an atmosphere of civility and respect or you’re not civil and respectful to each other. That’s a problem for us.

You need to take care of the needs of your customers, your people who work with you, and then you need to take care of the needs of your vendors. Because some of our vendors, we were their only business. We had a vendor who had a fire, and he was a printer who was doing our mailing pieces for us. We went down there and said, “Well, what’s going to cost you to get back?” It was a big amount of money. So, we said, “All right, we’re going to pay for the next six months of mailings in advance and that will give you the cash to get back to business.” It meant the world to him. He wanted to stay in business, and we found you buy a lot by treating your vendors well.

As I said earlier, we try to be kind as people. That’s part of what life is. Right now, we do two million catalogs a year. With COVID, part of the supply chain shortages has been paper. Paper and printing on that scale became a problem. Our catalog company came to us and said you’ve been fair to deal with and we’re going to make sure you still have paper, and King Schools can get printing when other people can’t get it. We’re going to make sure you do. I think the policy of being kind to vendors has really paid off. You don’t think of yourself as being in that position of power to vendors, but you really are. You just have to realize you have to be out of your way to be kind to them.

Risk management

On the topic of risk management, both of you were involved in your own plane crash. Can you share your emotions as you both went through that event? What was it like to step back into the cockpit for the first time?

John: The airplane was not the cause of the crash. We were the cause of the crash, so it was a case of whether we trusted ourselves. We know exactly what we did wrong. We were flying a Cessna 210 single-engine airplane at night over the top of an overcast cloud layer. We were on our way to teach a ground school class, and we had external pressures trying to make the class. It was getting dark and the generator quit working in the airplane. We said, “Well, we only have about an hour to go. Let us just shut off everything electrical and dead reckon towards our airport. The plan was to get in the vicinity of the destination, then turn on the generator and battery. We would recover via an instrument approach into the airport. The goal was to conserve the battery. We dead reckoned for about 45 minutes. When we got close, we turned on the electrical system and we got no indications. Absolutely nothing. The battery was completely dead.

Here we are on top of an overcast cloud layer. It is not quite dark yet, but it is getting dark quickly.  We were not even sure where we were since we dead reckoned. We decided to descend through the overcast cloud layer and when we get underneath the weather we will break out. We will figure out where we are, then go to the airport, and land. We said, “Okay, let’s go down through the overcast layer,” and we started descending. As soon as we get in the clouds right about 10,000 feet suddenly there is ice all over the aircraft. We continue descending and we get to where we think we are 200 feet above the ground. We never see the ground.  We have been all the way from 10,000 feet down to 200 feet and we don’t know exactly where we are. We decide to climb back up and consequently accumulate a second layer of ice on the aircraft. We get on top of the overcast cloud layer. I’m flying the airplane and am absolutely scared to death. Martha says, “John, we need to go back down.” I replied to Martha, “I don’t want to go back down. We’ve already been there, and we got no results.” While we are arguing the sun slowly sets below the horizon.

Martha says to me, “John, would you rather descend down now, or would you rather do it in the dark?” I hate it when Martha is right. So, we descended back down again. We think we are about 200 feet above the ground but still do not see the ground. Suddenly we break out of the clouds, and I say, “Well, there is a road there with cars on it. I’m going to land on that road.” It was a gravel country road and Martha said, “John you can’t land there. “Why can’t I land Martha?” She says, “I think I see power lines.” I said, “Well, I don’t see the power lines!” We get down and there are power lines. So, I said, “Fine. I’m just going to land right here in the field!” When we got in the cornfield, there was about 18 inches of snow on the ground, and the airplane went up onto its nose then came back down again.

Martha says, “John, I’m okay. I’m okay. I’ve got a bloody nose, but I’m okay.” I look up and I see there is a hole in the windshield. I said, “The hell you are! You have a bloody nose. Your head hit and went through the windshield.” Martha said, “No, no, no. I’ve just got a bloody nose. I’m okay.” I reach over and feel her back. There is blood all the way down the back. I said, “You got a hell of a lot more than a bloody nose. Why don’t we have the rest of this conversation outside the aircraft?” I open the door and see Martha’s blood everywhere all over the overhead of the aircraft. This was the first time I realized how incredibly dumb a smart person can be. I thought, “John, you absolute idiot. How could you dare take such a risk with the most precious person in the world?”

Martha: We had a toolbox that had been in the back. The toolbox hit me on the top of the head on the way out of the front windshield.

John: I am talking with Martha and make my way around the airplane. I see a trail of stuff out in front of the aircraft. There are tools, wrenches, rags, and oil cans all out in front of the aircraft. I thought, “I’ll be damned. Somebody landed here before we did.” [John laughing] Obviously, that was not the case, and I realized later it was our toolbox. Some guy comes along on the road, sees our airplane, and picks us up. We went to the hospital, and they stitched up Martha. The next morning Martha is in her classroom and I’m in my classroom teaching as if nothing happened.

Thinking back, you have the accident, you go to ground school the next day. How did you all talk about managing risk when you just had an accident?

John: We weren’t quite talking about risk at that time. We had curriculum, but I do not think risk was a part of the teaching at that time.

Martha: Right, we were just teaching to the knowledge test on the live two-day ground schools. We were not working risk management or scenario-based training in the course. We only covered the information people needed to pass the FAA knowledge test. Now when we prepare the scripts for our video lessons, we are still covering what pilots need to pass the knowledge test, but we are also putting risk management snippets and concepts in the appropriate places as they consider different operations.

John: We are slowly learning, but now we have expanded the curriculum. The whole aviation community was not talking about risk management at that time. We had to start talking about it. Looking back at the accident it was clear we did not pick the conservative option. We continued as if nothing had happened, and we just kept on going. What we could have done is right at that moment when the generator failed is find an airport and get below the overcast cloud layer. But we thought we would not have been at our destination that evening and our class would be left waiting. We had to teach class next day, so we failed to manage the risk appropriately.

Martha: Our talks about risk management and the stories we have written in Sky Kings: [Flying Adventures with John and Martha] are based on stupid things we did ourselves. We feel very lucky. We think we are both still alive because we always flew together. Having two of us in the cockpit makes it much easier to manage whatever happens. It helps to think things through, talk about it, and ask, “What should we be doing?” We would have avoided quite a bit of poor decisions had we been taught our number one responsibility as a pilot was to identify and mitigate risk.

John: Maybe we would not have avoided all the risky situations. Pilots hate to give up on a goal, particularly when there is money attached. We would hate to give up on the goal of reaching that city that night. To become a pilot, you must use physical skills, mental skills, and emotional control. Flying takes a great deal of effort over an extended period. Eventually you persist and you become a pilot, but you must persist through difficulty to become a pilot. By definition, pilots are goal-oriented people. Goal orientation for most of your life is a wonderful thing. But in aviation, being goal oriented can be a risk factor because you hate to give up on what you set out to do.

Martha: Our accident is part of why we understand what drives people who are flying for charter operators. The external pressures are more so than airlines. The airlines have pretty strict SOPs and oversight. However, the pilots that fly for charter operators and individual company operations are much more subject to pressure whether it is actual pressure from the company or just internal pressure. There is a need to get the flight done to keep their job, even though the company or the operator does not really say that specifically. We understand that mentality in a very visceral sort of way.

John, you said you were scared descending down below the clouds and then coming up. Martha, how did you feel in those moments?

Martha: John always got us out of scrapes before [John and Martha laughing].

John: Martha’s not a fearful person. I would be more scared than Martha was.

Martha: Well, you probably felt more responsible for both of us.

John: Well, that is right. I had not exercised risk management.

Martha: That accident was the genesis of our thinking about risk management. There were numerous other small things that happened. For instance, leaving off fuel because you will burn more fuel when you are heavier. Then you find out the weather forecast is completely different, and you need that extra fuel to safely land at your destination. You are leaving off fuel to save money. But you look at the situation and say, “Well, it could have been really unfortunate if things had gone another way.” These situations kind of mount up and you get more conservative. We are more conservative on fuel loads and fuel stops than we used to be 20 or 30 years ago.

Can you walk through the evolution of teaching to the FAA practical test and then the shift towards risk management?

John: I had a student in my class who was attending our two-day in person ground school. He was both a physician and an Episcopalian priest. He was a pillar of his community, but he did not follow the rules or the normal conventions of being a student. Surely, he had been a student a lot, but he just was not fully cooperative. He was impatient, would take frequent breaks, then come back late and asked if I would cover what he had missed. I had 50 people in the class. I felt that he was not patient enough to be trustworthy as a pilot, so, when the FAA came to give the test, I pointed this individual out. I said to the FAA examiner, “You need to talk to Dr. Parsons.” The FAA examiner says, “John I cannot pick somebody out of your classroom and talk to him because you said I should. He will call his congressman.” Instead, the FAA examiner said I should talk with Dr. Parsons, but I am just a traveling ground instructor. So, neither of us spoke with Dr. Parsons.

Martha and I went home and about a couple weeks later we get a phone call. The FAA examiner said, “John, I thought you would want to know the doctor is dead.” He was dead within two weeks. I felt terrible guilt over not having made the difference when I saw it coming and how could I have not done whatever I needed to do to make sure he was safe. I decided I was never going to let anybody put that guilt trip on me again. I was never going to fail to respond when I saw the trouble coming. Martha and I decided we also were not going to allow the same fate for the aviation community. If we thought the whole aviation community was going the wrong direction, we decided that it was our obligation to respond when we saw problems.

Martha: Dr. Parsons’ death changed our approach to risk management. Dr. Parsons was on a solo cross-country from Spokane, Washington to Moses Lake in central Washington. He was lost and in the mountains north of Spokane while there was heavy clouds and rain. The flight service station was able to guide him back to an airport. He landed safely, but said he needed to go back out because of a speaking engagement scheduled in an hour. He took off and crashed in the same mountains he was previously in. There was a lack of risk management in scheduling his cross-country. No one stopped him from trying to pack his schedule so tightly ahead of his speech. He was not trained to think that way. After Dr. Parsons’ death we got focused on the idea the FAA was asking the wrong questions on knowledge tests. The FAA was not focusing on the things that were actually killing people.

John: It was not just knowledge tests. Everything about learning to fly was focused on skills. There was no requirement for a student to learn how to identify risks and mitigate them. No requirement existed to help teach a student to learn how to identify and mitigate risk. In this case, Dr. Parsons is flying along as a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) pilot. He could get himself in a situation no amount of skill would get him out of. If a pilot does not identify the risks and mitigate them, they can be the most skilled person in the world and they could not solve the problem. Martha and I felt that was a mistake for the FAA to focus only on skills. The whole aviation community needed to focus on seeing the problem and keeping yourself out of the problem rather than building skills.

Martha: One of the things we felt was the FAA was not using the right kind of vocabulary to teach people like Dr. Parsons. The FAA was saying things like, “We are going to teach you good judgment.” An experienced doctor will likely not take the instruction from a young 20 year old regarding good judgement. We wanted the community to convert to talk about risk management tools that were unique to aviation risks. We needed to talk about tools that you can use in aviation. “Yes, you have to have good judgment, but here are some tools that will help you evaluate risk properly.”

John: Telling someone they are not good at decision making turns people off to aviation. “Well, how do I get better at decision making?” There’s no guidance, but it’s insulting to tell someone they are not good at decision making. We want to have a vocabulary that is not insulting and at the same time gives you guidance. “So how do you identify risk? How do you mitigate risks and give them steps along the way to do it?” They are tools that have to be useful.

Martha: To talk about them as tools rather than talking from the viewpoint of we are going to teach you how to make decisions. Instead, we are going to give you tools that you can use when you make your decisions.

John: We had to use a vocabulary that is acceptable to the learner. We think aviation historically has done a poor job of using common vocabulary. The whole time the FAA has done things like saying, “You have poor judgment.” You are not good at what they call aeronautical decision making. I think this is a misnomer. There’s nothing different about aeronautical decision making than any other decision making, but they need to give you tools.

Martha: Our shift in risk management started with the knowledge test. There was a symposium created by industry for flight instructors and the aviation community. High level people in various branches of the FAA attended. The FAA, I think, was shocked that the flight instructors and pilot examiners were upset with the FAA knowledge test. The feeling was the FAA was focusing on the wrong things. John was a very big part of getting that feeling going in the aviation community.

John: Yeah, I’m not reluctant to speak my mind and it gets me in trouble. One of the things that they would ask on a knowledge test is, “If you’re getting ready to take off at an airport, go to the performance charts and answer whether your takeoff run is going to be 1,610, 1,620, or 1,630 feet.” By asking questions like this the FAA wanted you to do double interpolations and pick a precise answer. This implies that you and your airplane are going to perform perfectly. Instead, you should pick the most conservative answer and not do double interpolation.

Martha: The FAA also had questions that were totally irrelevant to the pilot as far as operating an aircraft was concerned. Those questions are gone now. The FAA finally got shamed into getting rid of those questions. Until recently there used to be a question on the instrument written test, knowledge test, that asked, “How many satellites are in the GPS constellation?” The correct answer is, “Enough.” What difference does it make, and what can you do about it as a pilot if there are 23 satellites working instead of 24? It is a trivial question you can ask if you are trying to create a bell curve on the test to help weed out the people who have not gone deeply enough into the material. The FAA tests are not like a standard college class or high school class. People know the knowledge in this test could determine whether they live or die. Students study a lot, and it is a good thing most of them are scoring in the 80s, 90s, and some 100s. However, the FAA felt they needed to create a bell-shaped curve. One of the findings that came out of the Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) [was] there were issues with the practical test on what the examiners were covering. There was a lack of scenario-based questions.

John: The ARC decided we needed to do a better job of evaluating pilots. We need to evaluate pilots for more substantial things rather than trivial questions. Stop asking questions about physical skills. None of the questions had to do with identifying the risks of flying. Scenario-based questions allowed for students to identify and focus on risk management. I was on the next group that created the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), which included revising the knowledge test and practical test with emphasis on risk management. The FAA had to ask questions that were useful to the pilot and within the pilot’s control. For the very first time in aviation history, the ACS were asking pilots to identify risks and demonstrate the ability to mitigate risks. It was time to start training pilots differently and it took leadership to make these changes happen.

Martha: When the ACS first came about in 2016, I think there was a fair amount of pushback from the general community because they did not understand how scenario-based training on risk management was going to be applied. The community voiced concerns like, “You know it all depends on the skill level of the pilot. Some pilots learn quicker and better, and some come into the check ride with a lot more experience than others.” People have trouble with change. What they finally came to recognize is what the designated examiners were looking for was not a definitive answer like A. or answer B. Examiners were looking for a process and not an absolute answer to manage risk. “Do you know how to think about risk?”

John: When we train pilots, we use scenario-based training and provide courses for the Cessna pilot centers. The syllabus requires scenario-based training where the skill is required in the context of how they’re going to use risk management.

Martha: We realized the emotional effect on us from the Dr. Parsons incident when we were flying our Citation 500 coming back from Palm Springs to San Diego. The weather was moving in with overcast conditions all the way to the coast. Additionally, strong winds out of the west were creating turbulent conditions with strong down drafts on the east side of the mountains. We were on approach getting ready to switch over to Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport tower frequency. A Cessna 172 pops up on approach frequency and is asking approach to find a hole in the clouds to get over the mountains to Palm Springs.

He is a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) pilot, apparently not instrument rated, or he would not need to look for a hole in the clouds.  Approach is doing the usual bit of, “We have radar, but that does not tell us anything about clouds.” John keyed the mic without talking to Approach Control and said to this pilot, “We are in a jet, and we just came from Palm Springs. The flying conditions are really rough. If it is rough for us in a jet, then it will be incredibly nasty for you. You aren’t going to make it. Turn around and go back to Gillespie Airport. This is not your night to go to Palm Springs in a Cessna 172.” The guy turned around and went back to the airport.

John: I’m not going to let anybody put a guilt trip on me. I’m not going to let the aviation community put a guilt trip on me. I’m not going to stand for it.

Martha: Approach Control simply said, “Thank you.” The Approach Controller was not getting anywhere with this guy.

John: I do not think I said he was going to kill himself, but I said the equivalent. “It is not your night to do a trip to Palm Springs in a Cessna 172. You are not going to find a hole in the clouds. There is no hole unless you get an instrument approach, but you don’t want to do it anyway.”

Why was it such a challenge for the FAA to focus on risk management versus teaching a skill set?

John: Change. They’d never done it. The practical test standards had been in effect 60 years or so with minor changes in skills. When examiners give a check ride they will give a student a scenario that requires an inflight diversion to another airport. The student must decide where to divert to and demonstrate the ability to divert.  The FAA examiners are trying to evaluate whether a pilot on the check ride can successfully divert. If a person is unable to demonstrate a diversion on a check ride when it is not for real, then he probably will not be a good pilot in command.

How did that make you feel after the FAA rejected your suggestions on risk management?

John: We felt a sense of loss for the FAA and for the aviation community. Life is personal. When Dr. Parsons got killed it was personal to his family. It was personal to him. We had to do something that people will embrace. We felt that there was a lost opportunity.

Martha: The rejection was part of why we ended up writing a column for Flying magazine on risk management. The book Sky Kings is a complete compilation of those articles in which the majority are written on risk management. The column in Flying magazine became a venue for us to document the personal, powerful, and vivid discussions that the FAA would not let us write in the handbook.

John: Part of the genesis of all of this is Martha and I used to scare people in the airplane. We had our own airplane and people would say, “You’re going to kill yourself.” We felt that the vocabulary of risk management did not want to make us change. “You don’t have judgment. You can’t make decisions!” But I have judgment, and I can make decisions. The vocabulary did not help us to change. We realized that those past instructors had not been effective with us. It took years, but we thought we needed to create a vocabulary that would be more effective.

How did you and Martha develop a vocabulary to help people understand risk management?

John: We had a friend, Roger Baker, who oversaw safety programs for the FAA.

He said, “I’m dealing with a university and they’re not being very collaborative with me. I want you [John and Martha] to come and support me in this study.”

Martha: He was trying, was trying, to work with a university to develop a risk management program. Instead, the university was looking at his study as a research paper and not a risk management process which a pilot could use before, during, and after a flight.

John: We met Roger for breakfast to help him. We like to make words that will help people remember knowledge easier. When it comes to identifying the risks, let us figure out if we put the risks into categories and that way that they can remember. So, we created the acronym PAVE to determine the risks associated with the Pilot, the Aircraft, enVironment, and External pressures. We also thought pilots need an acronym when conditions change. To help address changing conditions we came up with the CARE acronym. CARE stands for Change, Alternatives, Reality, and External Pressures. Roger was trying to develop something the FAA would embrace and fortunately they did.  There has been much more collaboration with the FAA on developing risk management tools.

Martha: A few years later the FAA contracted us to write a risk management advisory circular. We wrote a piece for the FAA, but our style was not government bureaucracy. We wrote something that we thought would be extremely impactful and effective to people and the FAA looked at it and said, “We can’t say that. Your stories are too personal and vivid.” We have lost several friends in aviation, so yes it personal and powerful to us.

We think one of the reasons people listen to us and enjoy coming or do come to our risk management talks is because we’re not standing up there moralizing at people. We’re standing up there telling them, “Don’t do this, because we did it ourselves and we didn’t like the results.” We talk pretty freely about the stupid things we did early in our flying as a reason for them to not do the same thing and to use tools, PAVE, CARE, other stuff we’re providing during the talk to help have the right mentality, so they don’t go through what we went through. We think that has been a productive approach to people as far as the whole risk management concept being impacted. Many of our first draft scripts are developed by one of our course developers, an instructor working for us, and we review and edit based on our own experiences and what we think the right way to express it is. One of the things we work very, very hard at getting rid of is any tone or scent of being preachy, talking down to people or being preachy about it.

John: We think historically talking about safety has been pretty preachy. We think some of the things that are said are simply insulting, and you do not really get good results by insulting people.

Legacy

You had mentioned you started out with maybe five or six people in a class. How many people do you teach today?

John: It’s hundreds of thousands.

Martha: I think though in terms of unique people… I’m thinking that it’s in the order of maybe 80,000 unique individuals a year. When we were teaching the live classes using the direct mail, the number of students depended on where we were teaching. Typical in the 48 US states would be 40 to 60 students in a class. Up in Alaska, we taught in both Fairbanks and Anchorage. In Anchorage, we’d very typically have 120, 130 people because aviation is very much a lifeblood for them up there. They didn’t have much available in the way of ground school. We taught up there every two months for 10 years.

Of the 50 years of King schools, what are each of you most proud of that you’ve passed along to the aviation community?

Martha: Establishing the Airman Certification Standards (ACS).

John: I’m surprised, not as much proud, as I am surprised. One of the things we have found is people come to us and say, “You’ve been important in my life.” We are surprised by that. What we have slowly come to learn is flying is important in their lives, we help them do something they wanted to do. Pilots are very goal-oriented people, and we help them achieve something they wanted to achieve. I’m proud of that – we have done something that is good for a lot of people.

We talked about our magazine ads, expanding the number of people we are teaching because of the number of ads we had. We were just trying to make each ad successful. We were not thinking in terms of what we were doing for the aviation community, the number of people we were influencing in the aviation community, and the effect we had. After the fact, did we discover that, we might have made a difference in the aviation community. We discovered by people telling us. We did not really think in terms of, “Wow, we are really making a big difference.” We were just trying to run a successful business at that time, and we were making our ads work. As time went on, we realized our impact on a lot of people.

Martha: The other thing I would say that we are very proud of is our scholarship program for flight instructors. We created a program jointly with Aviation for Women [magazine] and another program jointly with the National Association of Flight Instructors. Individuals that are chosen to receive $5,000 cash for their flight training plus lifetime access to everything in the course. They can use the money to either get their initial Commercial Flight Instructor (CFI) certificate, or to get an additional rating, like an instrument instructor, or multi-engine instructor, or a helicopter instructor. Hearing the stories from their scholarship recipients has been very special and heartwarming.

John: We have people at air shows that will stop us and say, “You know, when I was little my father bought your tapes. I watched them constantly, and the guys with four stripes [commercial airline captains] are telling us these things. That makes us feel good.

Martha: Aviation, as you both well know, is a great community. A lot of very good people, very entrepreneurial people, are very welcoming people. If someone finds out you are a pilot, or you find out somebody else is a pilot, you automatically have a bond to a certain extent that is often very strong and very warm. As John was saying earlier, when you find out somebody else is a pilot, you already know a bunch of stuff about them. They have perseverance and strong emotional control, because they went through what it takes to become a pilot.

John: We recently got a phone call from the chairman of the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP). She says, “We would like to install you in our OBAP Hall of Fame.” Our first reaction is, that is not fair because they only have so many spots for the Hall of Fame. There could be someone who was black got into the Hall of Fame and they are putting two white people in the Hall of Fame. We said to the chairman, “You realize we are white, don’t you?” She says, “Yes, I know you’re white, but I really want to put you in the Hall of Fame.” We didn’t understand it until we got there. They had a ceremony in a facility just off of Los Angeles International Airport. The attendees were almost all black people, black airline captains. One after the other came, people said, “You know, we were not welcome in ground school classes. We couldn’t sign up for a ground school class.” They were not able to learn to fly, but our courses made it possible for them to eventually become airline pilots. At that point, we understood.

John: The acting administrator of the FAA was a guy named Billy Nolan, and he heard Martha was about to get an award. The award was the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for 50 years of flying. He says, “I want to hand her that award personally.” He had a big event, and he had Martha come to the event. He said, “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I’m going to go ahead and say this, if it weren’t for Martha, I wouldn’t have been an airline pilot, and I would not be the acting administrator of the FAA.  I had to pass a knowledge test for the Airline Transport Pilot (ATP). I also had to pass a knowledge test for flight engineer, and I had to use Martha for both of those. She changed my life.”

Each of you may not consider yourself a celebrity, but you know there is some significant notoriety that follows you around. How do you handle the burden of fame?

John: It’s an interesting question. I do not believe being a celebrity is a contribution. I believe we don’t generally use that word, and don’t like the word. It’s just nice to have played a role, and it’s a privilege to have played a role in the lives of a lot of people.

Martha: But it is a tool that can be used to convey a message, because like it or not, the celebrity status means people will listen to you. Then, if you have something worth listening to, that is passed along. We had to learn how to handle that. There is no school that says, learn to be a celebrity. Learn how to handle fans.

John: You’re absolutely right. We were at an airport the other day. I think it was Fort Lauderdale [Florida] and a couple pilots stopped me as I was going to the airplane. You used to do autographs. Now they want to do selfies, so you do pictures together. The technology has changed how you respond to it, so you got to get good at posing in pictures. When we do the picture, we are done, and nobody is talking. They do not know what to say, because they have never been through this before [meeting a celebrity]. We have to know what to say. We have to develop things that we can say to people that will be interesting to them.

Martha: We mostly ask questions about them.

John: Yeah, one of the things that we learn is you ask them, “What do you fly? How long have you been flying? What are your goals in flying?” You turn the conversation around and make it all about them. We must learn to do those things, and we do those things now. However, it requires effort on our part. If someone comes and wants to do a picture, wants to talk with you, it requires effort. They don’t know whether you have to go to the bathroom at the time. They don’t know whether you were rushing to get somewhere, your schedule, or you are holding up an airplane full of people. They do not know any of that. We still have to put the effort into meeting people, and we do.

Martha: One of the things that we have had to learn over the years is to build in extra time to the schedule. At AirVenture or Sun and Fun [both airshows], it takes 10 minutes to get from our hangar to the FAA building for when we are going to talk. We better allow at least 20 minutes just because people are going to want to take pictures and so on.

John: The last thing you want to do is leave people feeling you are annoyed.

Martha: Right or to brush them off because you are now getting late for when you are going to talk. It takes a little getting used to, and you have to remind yourself occasionally to leave time in your schedule between events to get from one place to another and still be able to be friendly to people that come up and want to talk.

John: It would be insulting for you to say, I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to be somewhere. So, we have to make sure we have time that we can talk to them and put that effort into it. I think we’re a little tired at the end of the day than we would be otherwise because of that. This is bragging, but it’s what happens. If we are going somewhere at AirVenture, and there’s thousands of pilots, if someone recognizes us, they’ll stop and ask for a selfie, and then a line will form. We can’t move because there’s now a line of people, and we’d be leaving a whole bunch of people. We need to be polite to them, and we just have to be in a situation where we can deal with that. Sometimes it’ll be 10 or 15 people before you can move on to the next person, move on to the next event, and as Martha says, you have to build in time for that.

Who are your mentors and role models as you’ve gone through your life, and what are some of those lessons that they’ve passed along to you all?

 

Martha: I would say, Bill Haeberle, Indiana University School of Business. Bill was a great inspiration to us.

John: Bill was a professor of enterprise and entrepreneurship. He helped people pursue entrepreneurship. He used to have a weekly meeting in his house, and they would have entrepreneurs come in and talk to us. He was a great inspiration. We had a friend, Harry Metz, who helped us get into turbine aircraft much quicker than we would have. In a time when it made no sense, we had the Cessna 340, and we were going to get in a turbine aircraft. Harry rented his [Aero ] Turbo Commander to us, and no one rents a Turbo Commander. We used it as our personal airplane for a while. When we purchased the Citation, we figured it would be hard for an insurance company to cover us.

Martha: We had 40 hours of turbine time in a Turbo Commander. The insurance company looked at a Citation and said, “I don’t think so.”

John: They are looking at us rolling their eyes. So, Harry put us on his insurance. He really made it possible for us to fly turbine aircraft. We could not have done it otherwise.  We had gone from Cherokees and then a Cessna 310, 210, 340, and the next airplane was a Citation. Lastly, we purchased the Falcon we fly today.

Martha: Harry had an aeromedical evacuation company using twin Cessnas and some jet aircraft, and he put us on his insurance. He had a deal with the insurance company that when he was happy with a pilot or combo of pilots, they were happy. He must have been a pretty good talker. Also, Joe Cossman on direct marketing was one of our mentors. He is the guy we really learned a lot about direct marketing from. We learned how to do ads, press releases and make them interesting.

John: People have, through the years, spent a confusing amount of effort on our behalf. We’ve had a lot of people help us out, and we are saying, “Wow, we don’t deserve this.” We are confused about how we can reciprocate to these people because they are very far along, and we are just trying to get there.

Martha: A lot of what we have learned and aspired to has been self-study. When we started working on marketing, we spent a lot of time with Joe Cossman, but we also bought a lot of the classic direct marketing books and self-studied on what they said and why.

John: We mentioned the San Diego Direct Marketing Club had a symposium, and everybody in that club was very beneficial to us. They wanted to see people succeed. One of the things that we found is, being a young couple, everyone wants you to succeed. We’re no longer a young couple. We think we are, but we are no longer a young couple. People go out of their way to help you succeed. “Did you have that feeling, Martha?”

Martha: Oh, yeah without question. We should be more specific about who it is, but we really had a lot of people that are good friends.

What advice would you give to future leaders, be it in aviation or otherwise?

John: In life, I think what we learn is to have a passion for what you do and pursue that passion. Care deeply about that passion and figure out how you can make some kind of contribution that affects the lives of many people. The more contribution you can make, the better you will be.

John: Peter Diamandis, a mentor, said, “If you want to become a billionaire, you do something good for a billion people.” We talked about Steve Jobs, for instance. There’s eight billion people in the world and seven billion cell phones. He’s really made a profound influence on all of our lives. Cell phones have connected us to the internet.

Martha: One of the things Peter Diamandis said in a recent newsletter, is he has started and invested in a number of different companies. He is the one that developed and promoted a $10 million prize for the first reusable ship that went into space and came back and flew again within two weeks.

John: Charles Lindbergh was motivated by winning a prize, the Orteig Prize, they called it. He wanted to be the first to fly across the North Atlantic to get that prize. The idea is prizes motivate people.

Martha: What Peter Diamandis was saying in his recent blog is something we talk about in Lift: [How to Start, Run and Grow Your Own Successful Business] and in our business talks, coming in part from him, that he started companies, invested in companies, and the ones that did well were the companies that he had a passion about from the beginning because when they hit hard times, because they always do, he was willing to stick with it and figure out how to make it work, changing whatever needed to change, and so on. But the companies he did not really have a passion for, he eventually lost money and sold off because he just did not have the passion to see it through. When we talk about why people need to have a passion about whatever business they go into because it’ll make you stick it out when times get tough, and they always will at some point, sooner or later.

John: One of the lines you probably heard us say before is that you should PLAY. The acronym stands for Passion, have Lots of interest, be Always learning, and Y is Yet again you have these habits. So, if you have the habit of always learning and having lots of interest and have a passion, you will be able to find things that you can do for people. Remember we talked about a business. A business is the identification of a customer need or want that you can fulfill profitably, and so we have suggested building habits that will help you do good things for people. You can find things that will be helpful to other people. That is what we are doing, something that is good for people and people will pay us money for. We have learned through time each of us has the capability of learning, and that is part of who we are. We enjoy learning and respect the idea of learning. Of course, there is learning in the teaching business.

Leadership

Where did you come up with your leadership model?

Martha: Where did we come up with our leadership model?

John: What is our leadership model?

Martha: Do not micromanage. Pick good people and let them go. A lot of reading, I think.

John: I think it’s all about you taking care of their needs. If you want good results from somebody, you take care of people’s needs.

Martha: Our ideas came from direct marketing books, in part, in terms of success with a company. Then we carried that over to life in general.

Being you are such a young couple, what is next for John and Martha?

John: Well, I don’t know. We flunked retirement. We’re still working.

Martha: We are still having fun, so why go somewhere else? We’re still doing new things with King Schools. We’re in the middle of launching a program for maintenance training at flight schools and at colleges and universities, using their own fleet and their own mechanics to basically set up a Part 147 maintenance training school. The FAA loosened the regulations last year, and you no longer have to have X number of hours of seat time in a classroom. You can do it online. As long as you achieve and pass all of the markers. The FAA also said you can now have remote locations. It used to be you only had a central location, and that was it. No branches or distant locations. So, it’s much more flexible than it used to be, which allows an FBO who has their own fleet, has their own mechanics to set up a training program and have apprentices working for them that are getting trained at the same time.  Brian Huff, who’s doing our business development with colleges and universities, created the syllabus and the training program for the 147 maintenance training schools.

John: We think we understand the crisis of mechanics will be more severe than the crisis of pilots. There’s a bigger shortage of mechanics. Boeing said that in a study recently. Can you still quote Boeing? I don’t know that it’s okay to quote Boeing [John laughing].

Martha: Yeah. Oh. Are they an expert witness anymore?

John: Well, they’ve had a tough time.

Martha: Yeah. One of the advantages of the maintenance training program I think is going to be productive for us and for the aviation community is it’s something high schools can comfortably adopt without feeling like there’s a lot of liability. It’s a really big deal for a high school to get into a flight training program with the issues of liability and adequate control and so on. These are minors that they’re working with. Whereas a college aviation program, the people are legally adults, generally 18 and over. It’s a different ballgame. Maintenance training, they can see that as good jobs. The airlines are desperate, as is general aviation for maintenance technicians. The wages have just really gone up a lot. They see it as a very valuable thing for their students that they can do pretty easily with very, very minimal risk exposure. We think that’s going to be a really big market with potential customers to promote that. That’s part of what we’re doing still.

John: If someone has a flight school, all of those airplanes have to be maintained. You could then use those same airplanes that you fly during the day with the students to teach mechanics. That would be a bonus for that flight school. That’s our plan. We will see how it goes.

Interviewing John and Martha was an unforgettable experience and privilege. They welcomed us warmly into their home and business, sharing their life lessons in success and failure in both business and flight. Their desire to make aviation fun, safe, and easy to grasp for beginners through highly experienced aviators has impacted aviation beyond measure. From breaking barriers to changing how we think about flying, they created the gold standard of aviation… even if they do label themselves as a “mom and pop” operation! Despite their great notoriety, we will never forget experiencing first-hand their genuine humility and kindness you see in every one of their videos, seminars, and speeches.

Interviewed by Maj Stephanie Jones, US Air Force, and Maj Paul Ferris, US Air Force.