THE KINGS OF AVIATION VIDEO by Glenn Daly

"I f you were flying along and struck the top of this tower," John King says, on screen, indicating an obstruction on the magnified sectional chart behind him, "This number (pointing to the elevation at mean sea level) is what your altimeter would read upon impact, and this, (pointing to the parenthetical height above ground level) is how far you'd fall."

If you've ever read a flying publication, you've seen John and Martha King's two page, four color ads for their King Schools' instructional videos. If you've completed one their Video Exam Courses, or bought any of their 'Take-Off' videos, you're also aware of their enthusiastic teaching techniques and folksy midwestern charm. I had the opportunity to interview the Kings recently and, besides discussing the obvious, their sole proprietorship of the world's leading aviation training video company, the Kings shared insights into their lives and dreams, and their take on the future.

We talked in a small conference room at their office building on the eastern border of Montgomery Field, both of them just off the set, wearing their on-screen uniforms: yellow 'King' golf shirts and dark slacks. They're both of middle height, and as effervescent in person as you'd imagine. John laughs at the slightest provocation; Martha seems a tad more serious, as if she were the business side of the duo and John the sales. Regardless of how they sort it out, the mix works.

The Kings produce, in house, every one of the half million videos they annually ship. In their building is a full TV studio with all the latest high-tech bells and whistles. They do all animation, in house. They do ad-ready layouts, write all copy and all scripts, test and duplicate each video, then box, wrap and ship them all over the world, all in house.

They met as co-eds on the campus of Indiana University and, in June '95, celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary while covering the Paris Air Show for ESPN2. John says, "What we had planned, from the start, was that we'd be equal partners in business - and we have been ever since."

Their first venture, however, flopped. "We had a lubrication service for truck fleets, and then we developed systems and operating procedures and sold franchises," says John. "One of our goals was to have fifty franchises from coast to coast by the time I was thirty years old - and, we met that goal. But there's a Chinese proverb that says, 'Be careful of what you wish, you might get it.' We forgot to say 'profitable' - we just said we wanted to be 'big'." Martha says, "There were some fundamentals that we didn't have straight at that point." "And one of those fundamentals," John continues, "Is that we weren't in something that we passionately enjoyed." They both lubricated their share of trucks, lying beneath them in mud- puddled lots and greasy garages, dirt falling into their faces, oil dripping onto their clothes. "Pretty soon," John says, "You're trying to isolate yourself from the reality of your business. And that's a bad way to go.

"In the new business, we said, 'Let's just do something for fun for a while, and we'll have a good time until a serious business comes along.' It's been twenty-one years, and we're still waiting for a serious business." More chuckles. "We've had a lot of fun, though," says Martha. "We've really enjoyed the life, a lot, and we've enjoyed the people we've met and the growth that we've had. We learned a lot as time went on."

John says, "The key to it is that you pursue your passion because, if you're not pursuing your passion, life doesn't have a great deal of meaning to you."

Their passion brings them in contact with a special group of people. Says John, "Very often, Martha and I have the occasion to speak to [a gathering of] a hundred pilots, and it's awesome, because, when you've got a hundred people of that category, you've got the movers and shakers in society - the people who get things done. You know that there's no quitters in that room and there's no lazy people in that room ... because [learning to fly] takes an extended commitment over a long period of time." And through their videos, John says, "We get to play a very intimate part in their lives, during a time [when flying is] the most important thing in their lives. We get to meet people like the director of the Interplanetary Space Program for NASA, and he cares about us because we've played an important roll in his life. That's really a nice aspect of it."

They moved to San Diego from Indianapolis in 1970, just prior to opening the lubrication franchise business. John says, "We had some cash in the bank, bought an airplane and learned to fly. We had time on our hands and we went to Florida for vacation in this Cherokee 140. When we got done with our vacation, we headed north and the weather kept getting colder and colder ... and somewhere about Tennessee, we said to ourselves, 'Why are we flying north?'" "So we turned west," says Martha. "We looked at Santa Barbara - and Santa Barbara's very pretty - but, I think, La Jolla, from the air, is what did it for us".

Since then, they have accumulated over 7,000 hours in the air, almost all of it together. They own a Citation and a Mooney, and lease a helicopter, and they've also piloted blimps, hot air balloons, gyrocopters, gliders and seaplanes. They each hold every category and class of pilot and flight instructor license and rating, and John believes that Martha is the first woman in history to be so qualified.

Martha is particularly partial to flying the blimp; John's airborne passion is the helicopter. He says, "The helicopter is what flying was like when you were a kid. You closed your eyes and you dreamed you could fly by flapping your arms, and you rose above everything and you could go forward and backward and sideways ... well, that's what you can do in a helicopter."

Asked about advice for someone just starting out, John says, "Aviation is something that you cannot do casually. It's a very challenging thing. There's no one who learns to fly that somewhere doesn't think, 'I'm not going to be able to do this.'" But the payoff makes it worthwhile. "It's the most rewarding thing that anyone could do," John says. "Once you become a pilot it becomes a major way in which you define who you are. It's conquering a third dimension. It gives you a new perspective and view of life - you feel differently about the entire world, once you have risen above it in a machine that you control. It requires intellectual capability, emotional strength and control, manipulative capability and coordination - it's a profoundly engaging thing. There are fundamental drives people have that make them want to do difficult things and use a lot of their capabilities. Flying uses a great deal of your capabilities, and that's why it's so rewarding."

Their perception of their own business provides insight into the way information will be exchanged in the future. Martha says, "We think of ourselves as an education company, not a video company. We were teaching a long time before we got into video, and we'll be teaching a long time in the future, whether video is the medium or not. I don't really know what the medium for transmitting information is going to be in the future, but it's going to be some marriage of computer and video, probably, or ... who knows what comes beyond that. So we're trying to stay as open as we can to whatever technology comes down the pike." John says, "It may not be too far down the road before video's an archaic medium." He mentions 8 track tapes and Beta cassettes, then says that, in a few years, we may look at video and say, "'What a horrible format that was. It was linear and it wasn't interactive, and you didn't have random access.' There may be a time, very soon ... where we'll look back and say, 'Wasn't that a clunky system.'"

John's personal crystal ball doesn't divulge specifics, but it readily displays emotion. He says, "I don't know what life holds in the future for us, but it's going to be pursuing a passion of some sort. Aviation's one, amateur radio's another, and another passion we've had for a long time is small business and entrepreneurship. I really think that there's more opportunity for people in small businesses, now, than there has ever been, because we have a rapidly accelerating rate of change in our country - change creates opportunity. As society evolves, we're getting more mechanisms that enable people to succeed on their own. We have communication, fax machines, the internet ... overnight package express ... all of these things make it possible for you to be at your home and run a relatively sizable business. And all of this increases the training requirement - there's a tremendous amount of learning required in our society, just to stay even with what's going on. We're in the training business and we're trying to figure out how we can take care of people's needs in the [future]."

The trend toward computerization in the cockpit evokes a couple of stories from John. "They say they're going to change the hiring requirements [for pilots]," he says. "Flying experience will not be important, but you will have to be able to type fifty words per minute." He and Martha chuckle once again, and then he tells another. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he says, "Congratulations! You're on the first, absolutely, completely automated flight. There is no human being in the cockpit of this aircraft because we have now developed systems to remove the element of human error. This airplane is completely automated in all its flight control systems, navigational systems, communication systems. Do not be concerned, because absolutely nothing can go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ... ."

The Kings are also involved in shaping general aviation's future. According to John, "NASA is leading a consortium of companies who are putting together a new project called AGATE (Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiment) ... and what they're trying to do is incorporate all of this new technology - computerization, communication, automation, and so on - to simplify flying an aircraft. In many aircraft you have mixture, prop, throttle. They'll put one lever in the aircraft [and], if you want to go faster, you'll push the lever forward; if you want to go slower, you'll pull the lever back. They're going to have much more fuel efficient electronic ignitions. They're planning on making the airplanes much more efficient from a fuel standpoint, much more efficient aerodynamically, [while] also reducing the intellectual requirement involved in flying an airplane. It's now an enormously difficult thing to do, and it doesn't have to be. Things have been added over the years to make flying easier, safer, whatever ... but nobody's ever gone back to the drawing boards and done a complete redesign to incorporate all the packages. It's just kind of a hodgepodge, and, particularly with computerization, there's so much that could be done that way. NASA's leading it, the FAA's involved in it, airframe manufacturers and training companies are involved in it, and they're all trying to reduce the complexity of flying an aircraft."

To that end, John and Martha King remain passionately involved, believing also that they should give back something to the community that has supported them for so long. Says John, "One of the things we want to do as a company, and as individuals, is be good citizens. We teach prospective entrepreneurs at Helix Adult Education Center every semester. And, we do a lot of speaking at aviation safety related gatherings. Martha and I have been flying little airplanes, now, for twenty-seven years, and we've done a lot of things that are probably not the wisest things in the world. You like to learn those lessons and pass them on to others. And, so, we do a lot of that kind of speaking, a lot of contribution to the aviation community at large."

Thanks to the Kings, the aviation community, at large, has been much the better for it.

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copyright 1996 & 97 Stephen Glenn Daly - All Rights Reserved