Safety Talk: What John and Martha King Have Learned

There are probably few pilots who don’t recognize the famous teaching couple, John and Martha King, and the company they founded—King Schools—to help teach new and existing pilots everything except the actual flight training. The company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, and John and Martha are still actively flying their Dassault Falcon 10. As holders of almost every pilot certificate and rating in existence, they seem to have run out of further certifications to pursue.

Over the years, the Kings have learned a lot about flying and the meaning of safety. After nearly killing themselves a few times, they gained a healthy respect for the importance of safety margins and evaluating and mitigating risk. They have also emphasized that the commonly repeated claim about driving to the airport being riskier than general aviation is actually a myth. According to statistics, the opposite is true, and the Kings haven’t shied away from sharing this data. Rather than endlessly repeat bad information, such as the airport-driving myth, they would prefer to see pilots, especially new ones, embrace the concept of risk management. As John King says, “Flying is not safe. It’s a risky activity,” and he and Martha are not afraid of the controversy that this statement generates. 

How did you finally come to understand the concept of risk management?

Martha: That was Dr. Parsons.

John: We were doing weekend ground schools. I had a student who was both an Episcopalian priest and a radiologist who just didn’t follow the conventions of a classroom, and I felt he probably wasn’t patient enough to do good risk management decisions. I went to the FAA inspector who was coming to give the test on Monday morning and said, “You’ve got to talk to Dr. Parsons. He’s going to kill himself.” And he said, “I can’t just go pick some guy out of your class and talk to him, just because you said so. He’ll call his congressman.” I think he said, “You talk to him.” I swore [and thought], “No, I’m not gonna talk to him. I’m just a ground instructor, and he’s this [influencer] in his community.” Neither one of us talked to him, and so we went home.

Two weeks later, an FAA guy called me and said, “John, I thought you’d want to know Dr. Parsons is dead.” That’s how long it took him to kill himself. He was very impatient. Of course, that’s not a good risk-management philosophy. 

The other thing is, as we went around [teaching ground school], we felt that the FAA was asking things on the test that weren’t killing people. They were asking about trivial things that didn’t help the people do a better job of identifying and mitigating the risks of flying. For instance, they would ask a double-interpolation question about the distance for takeoff on the runway. My philosophy is, if you’re down to doing double interpolations, just pick a more conservative number. Don’t try to get it that precise.

Martha: Dr. Parsons was kind of the culminating thing. But we would go back to cities on a routine cycle, and it was not uncommon for students to show up in the class and say, “Do you remember Bill, who was here six months ago with me?” And we’d say no.

John: We said, “What happened?” He said, “He got killed.”

Martha: We accumulated people like this, that we had taught, some of whom we’d gotten to know very well. Dr. Parsons was just a final straw.

John: I felt very guilty about Dr. Parsons and that I hadn’t intervened. We decided that never again were we going to let someone put a guilt trip on us like that. If the situation came up, we were going to intervene, and then we began to feel that way about the whole aviation community. We felt what the FAA was doing, that this is all scrambled up, that the FAA and everybody’s vocabulary about safety wasn’t helpful. We felt that we needed to have a new vocabulary, a new way of talking about it. And you’ll notice that we keep throwing in risk management because we think safety is the goal, but the way you get there is you identify the risks and mitigate them. You have people say things like, “There can be no compromise with safety.” The FAA administrator will say that, or the secretary of transportation: “Safety is our number-one priority.”

Martha: Airplanes are built to fly for various purposes, military, commercial, fun, but anytime you start any kind of motorized vehicle, whether it’s an airplane, a boat, a car, a truck, a snowmobile, you’re undertaking some amount of risk.

John: It’s safer to leave the airplane in a hangar. But that’s not what people do, and that’s not what we want to do. We want to fly the aircraft, and you cannot do any activity in an aircraft without some degree of risk. Our job as pilot in command is to identify those risks and think about them, and mitigate them. Flying is not safe. It’s a risky activity.

Was there an example after Dr. Parsons where you intervened and felt you were able to get your message through?

Martha: We were coming back from Las Vegas on a dark and stormy night. It was dark and windy, and there was a lot of turbulence over the mountains east of San Diego, coming in from Las Vegas. We were in a Citation.

John: The marine layer was all the way from the coast, right up against the mountains, and this guy is calling approach control and saying, “Can you vector me towards a hole in the clouds?”

Martha: He said, “I want to climb through a hole and go to Las Vegas.” It comes out that it’s a Cessna 172, he’s got four people on board, and he would have to get to 9,500 feet just to clear the mountains the way he was planning to go.

John: I got on the radio, he’s talking to the controller, and I just interrupted. I said, “Tonight is not your night to go to Las Vegas. Not in a 172 with four people on board.” And as I said, we’re in a Citation. It’s rough. We didn’t like it. We wouldn’t do it again.

Martha: There are no holes. The clouds go all the way to the mountains. If you’re not instrument-rated, you’ve got no business being out here. He turned around, and he called the controller back and said, “Can you vector me back to Gillespie?”

John: Then the controller said, “Thank you.” I didn’t feel bad about intervening.

Martha: That’s the most direct one that we’ve done since then, but we’ve tried [intervening] through our risk-management talks that we started doing about 30 years ago. 

John: We want to do an approach in a vocabulary that is acceptable to the listener, that is respectful. As pilot-in-command, it is your job to mitigate the risks, and we don’t say, “go/no-go.” That’s not the decision. The decision is, can you change the way you go to mitigate the risks? Can you go at a different time or different altitude, or on a different route, or change the load? It’s not: “You can’t go.” You want to mitigate the risks. That guy on that particular night shouldn’t have gone. But in general, we need to think about the risk, and we may decide that we can’t mitigate the risk, but that’s how you get a safe result, as you identify and mitigate the risk.

Do you think that we’re becoming more mature and accepting of these concepts, or do we still have a long way to go?

John: We now have the airman certification standards, which include risk management. We used to certificate pilots who only had a skills test and had never been required to demonstrate the ability to identify and mitigate risks. Now we are…asking people to identify and mitigate risks, plus we’re having standards for knowledge. So we’re not going to ask trivial questions of people. Yes, I think it’s happening. The place where it’s happening the most is in the FAA. They’re changing their vocabulary, and I think it’s a benefit to everybody.

You were both honest in your writing, talking about your experiences and some fairly risky behavior. Did that scare you straight?

John: Sometimes we don’t pick up on things as quickly as we should. We would scare people. We would come home, and the people who cared about us would give us a lecture. And many times we felt the lecture was not particularly a beneficial lecture, but we slowly picked up on the idea that if we care about people, we’re scaring them, and we need to change our behavior.

Martha: We also scared ourselves sometimes. One time, going into San Antonio in the Citation, when we left fuel off out of San Diego because it was cheaper in San Antonio—after all, we’d have plenty of fuel to get there. And then they got an upslope condition and it got foggy for like 500 miles. It became a case of we'd better make this ILS approach successfully, because we don’t have enough fuel to go anywhere else. [These incidents] make you resolve that there’s more important things than getting the lowest fuel price somewhere, and there’s better ways to manage what’s going on than leaving off fuel if there’s any question about what the weather might be going to do.

John: Sadly, you have to get pretty old to get all these lessons. But we did learn. We scared ourselves.

Is risk management and mitigation a fundamental part of your courses?

John: [Now] it’s a fundamental part of virtually everything we do. The way it got that way is that we didn’t like being talked down to. People talk about aeronautical decision-making. I have a hard time with that concept because I don’t understand how that’s different than any other decision-making. And people talk about, “You don’t have judgment.” The problem with judgment is it’s a demeaning thing to say, and it gives you no guidance. What we try to do is be positive and tell you something you can do about it, how you can do it, and why it’s practical for you to do it. It’s part of the idea of how you teach people…by giving them guidance and things that can help them.

Martha: We were doing ground school classes and following along with what the FAA was asking about, which was not risk management at that point. Because of the people that we knew as we taught live who got themselves killed in airplanes, people who were respected and admired, who were friends and good people, we were very annoyed with people we thought were good pilots. Why did they do what they did? We developed these risk-management talks and got good feedback on them. As we revised the courses after we were doing the talks, and with the FAA, we started putting in risk management because we thought it was an important part. Even if the FAA wasn’t asking questions in that manner, it was important for the people we were teaching to get it, important for what we felt our purpose was, and our relationship to our customers was.

Was there any kind of pushback because people didn’t grasp the concept?

Martha: There was a lot of pushback because it was common to say, one pilot to another, “The most dangerous part of the trip was the drive to the airport.” That would absolutely be true if you were flying commercial, but not if you were flying general aviation.

John: People felt that it wasn’t supporting the aviation community properly by acknowledging that it’s a risky activity. We took the accident rate per 100,000 hours and converted it to an estimated accident rate per mile, and we came up with the idea that, when compared to the automobile accident rate, it was not true. It would be seven times per mile more likely to be involved in a fatal accident in a general aviation airplane than you are in a car. People didn’t like that. They didn’t want to admit it. We call it the big lie. The big lie is one you’ve told long enough and often enough that you believe it yourself. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a lie. It is.

Martha: We were comfortable with that position for a lot of reasons, and one of them was that we had a good friend who was learning to fly, and she got a couple of hours past solo and quit. We asked her why she quit, and she said, “I really enjoyed it, but I’m a scuba diver and I’m a skier and I ride horses, and in every one of those activities, they sit you down and tell you about the things in that activity that can kill you, and they teach you how to avoid it.  My flight instructor is just telling me, “There’s no risk. Don’t worry about it.” And she said, “It’s obvious there’s risk. You don’t have to be a genius to see that there’s risk in this, and if they’re not going to teach me how to mitigate it, how to take care of myself, then it’s not an activity that I’m going to do.” We think that we were losing more students through their recognizing that they weren’t learning how to mitigate risk, how to handle risk, as opposed to people who got scared off because we said that there was risk to it. 

Was it hard to bring this discussion up and teach the instructors how to teach it?

John: We have a couple [of flight instructor refresher clinics], one for airplanes and one for helicopters, and we have risk management as a subject, and it’s now accepted as part of the instruction community.

Martha: It was something that was important to us as far as our purpose in King Schools, which we felt was not just to teach people the knowledge they needed in order to fly, but also the risk management skills they needed to stay alive and flying, because so many of the people that we knew that died had been friends that we admired and liked.

John: It was personal to us. We weren’t going to let that happen anymore.

Martha: There is still a significant issue with flight instructors. We worked with a lot of DPEs [designated pilot examiners], and they are complaining that a lot of the flight instructor applicants that come to them don’t know how to take a practical test, and how to [use] scenarios. The general feeling is that [there is a] big push to get a lot of pilots through the pipeline to get to the airlines, and this has deteriorated the seasoning of flight instructors.

John: The flight examiners are telling us that applicants are not properly prepared to be a pilot in command when they show up. They don’t want to be flight instructors. They’re there in the interim until they get hired [by airlines]. 

Martha: The pipeline pulls them through fast enough that they—not all, by any means, but a significant number—feel that they don’t have to bother to be good, because they’re going to be gone before they’re going to get any real feedback…[like], “We don’t want you around anymore because you’re not good with the students.”

Martha: We have the perception that historically, people who liked aviation and flying for its own sake undertook it, because it was going to be some time and quite an apprenticeship before you ever got to the airlines. Now, if you just want the good pay and so on, it’s more attractive as a career path, because you’re going to get to the airline so much quicker than you would say, 20 to 30 years ago. That is pulling more people in who are in it for the pay rather than for the love of aviation.

Are there any ratings or certificates that you don’t hold?

John: We don’t have powered lift [tiltrotor], but we have every category and class that existed at that time.

What’s your advice for pilots to mitigate the apprehension of an upcoming checkride?

Martha: You never completely get over it, which, in some ways, is good, because you want to feel ready. The answer is preparation, and it’s taking control or command of your own preparation. One of the things that we’re told by DPEs that private pilot applicants should be doing that they’re not doing is going to the ACS [Airman Certification Standards], and the regulations and making sure they know how much cross country time they need, how much night time, how many landings at a towered airport. Applicants show up that don’t have the basic requirements according to the regulations, and [DPEs] would like for…applicants at any level to be knowledgeable about what they actually need. There’s plenty of information available for that, and take command of their training and preparation, rather than just sitting there and being fed by their instructor, when it might not always be correct. The word is more proactive about their training, and therefore confident when they get done, when they show up for the check ride, confident that they have done what they need to do, are prepared for what is going to happen, and preparation makes a huge difference in how relaxed you feel.

John: Be involved in your learning and manage your learning.

Is there a favorite kind of flying for each of you?

John: It depends on what you want to do. If you want to fly VFR and see things beautifully, you find a helicopter, it’s just a perfect way to see things on the ground.

Martha: We fly our R22 in Southern California. It’s just an incredibly beautiful way to see the countryside, to really understand it. If you want to get somewhere in a hurry, a small jet is the way to go. We fly an old Falcon 10. I enjoy instrument flying very much, because I like the precision of it and the 3D building of the picture that you need in order to know where you are and where the airport [and] the approach are, the other airplanes, everything that’s going on.

John: The most difficult thing we’ve ever flown is a blimp. A helicopter is hard to fly, but at least it does what you ask it to do. You can ask a blimp to turn left, and it’ll take a long time to go left. We used to have passengers come up and say, “Are these controls hooked up backwards? You’ve got full left, and the airship is going to the right.” We said, “That’s why we have full left.” It takes a while to respond, so people think the controls are hooked up backwards.

Is it worth owning such a classic airplane like the Falcon 10? It must be hard to find parts or service.

Martha: We bought it in August 2001, and yes, it’s been worth it. [That was] when we were flying the Citation. The original Citations were two-pilot airplanes, but everybody thought they were single-pilot. And there was a lot of poo poo, “They fly a Citation, not a real jet,” and the Falcon 10 is a real jet, and learning the systems, which are very airline-like, and redundancy, actually thinking about high Mach numbers.

You hit on a sore point; the parts are getting difficult for the 10s. We went through a C check last summer, and basically, the shop waved us goodbye after what was supposed to be six weeks and turned into four months. They said we don’t want to see you again because we can’t get parts for you anymore.

We’ll likely change to something else in the next [few] years, simply because the maintenance is high on a Falcon 10. It’s a real thrill to fly, and it’s very solid. It rides turbulence well, but you don't like to see it go in the shop.

You’ve seen a big shift in technology in general aviation. Has this helped improve safety overall?

John: I don’t think the Cessna would still be selling single-engine airplanes if they had not gone to the Garmin G1000.

Martha: They would have missed the market.

John: It would improve safety, because there wouldn’t be any other airplanes. But I suspect that the G1000 is a safer system.

Martha: Even before G1000, with the cruder GPS that didn’t have the same kind of moving maps, I think it helped because people now felt comfortable if they went out to the practice area when they were a student, that they could figure out how to get back to the airport. Ideally, they could do it with pilotage, but if not, they could hit direct-to on their GPS, and they’d be able to get home. Particularly if you were flying in an area with a lot of hills or mountains, and your performance was such that you were down low, you still knew where you were. That kind of situational awareness is certainly a help. It has introduced a different issue from not knowing where they were, and that’s people just following the direct-to on the GPS, and they go plowing right through restricted areas or prohibited areas or active MOAs without talking to anybody.

John: Something that’s very surprising, that is an improvement in risk management in aviation, is ForeFlight [the electronic flight bag app].

Martha: Situational awareness, as far as terrain, airspace, also other traffic, if they’ve got ADS-B In. They can look at the airport they’re going to, and they can tell if there’s any traffic. If there is traffic, they can tell which runway they’re using, and they can spot somebody’s on downwind, somebody’s on base. There’s an enormous amount of situational awareness that just was never available to us before.

John: I think technology can and does improve our ability to identify and mitigate risks.

Martha: That brings up the issue, and we have a lesson on this in our flight instructor refresher courses, of the flight instructor needing to work with a student on how and when to use it, what the pitfalls are in terms of having databases up to date, your charge, properly downloaded for where you are and where you’re going, and how to make sure you’re still looking outside the airplane and not just staring at your tablet.

John: One of the risks that you have to think about is, what are you going to do if you drop your iPad? Martha and I were flying the other day, and we take turns, but she was co-pilot, I was captain, and she says, “Where’s your iPad?” I say I dropped it on the floor some minutes ago. She says, “I didn’t know that.” And I say, “I didn’t intend you to know that,” but it’s a real risk because many times you can't reach the iPad on the floor without unbuckling your seatbelt, and you don’t want to do that, just keep flying the airplane. Those are things the instructor needs to teach a student, that one of your risks is dropping the iPad, and don’t let it kill you. It could.

What are some of the risks that you see still need to be addressed?

John: When we see a room full of pilots, we see a room full of people who learn to fly over an extended period of time, using physical skills, mental skills, and emotional skills, and putting them all together and becoming pilot in command. They persisted in this over a long period of time and worked very hard at it. You see a room full of goal-oriented people. Now, goal orientation in most things in life is a wonderful thing but, as a pilot, is a risk factor because people hate to give up on a goal, and all of the things that pilots do and they persist when they shouldn’t is because they don’t want to give up on a goal. They want to complete their goals. We need to have the aviation community recognize that their own goal-setting behavior is the biggest risk.

We’re kind of our own worst enemies…

John: Exactly. You need to mitigate that risk and make plans for not getting there. What are your alternate ways of dealing with it, so that you will be willing to give up on a goal, and so you need to think about the risk of your own goal-oriented behavior and how to mitigate it.

Martha: One of the comments that DPEs have is that they will be doing a check ride with an applicant, and they set up a scenario where you have a rough-running engine, or whatever it may be, which should stimulate you to go to some alternate. I’d go through the checklist to see if I can figure out what’s wrong. And if that doesn’t solve anything, I would pick out an alternate airport, and I’d go there. The DPE says, “Well, do that,” and [the applicant] doesn’t have a clue how to do it because they never did it in their flight training. They only talked about it. Doing it, particularly if you have to figure out how to get into the pattern for a non-towered airport, it’s not something easy to do on the fly when you’re under stress and a check ride.

Is scenario-based training a weak area?

Martha: A number of schools put out applicants who have not been trained using scenarios. They’ve been trained more on physical maneuvers, and we’ve got to go from A to B to C, and there has to be X distance, but there has been no scenario set up where they have to think about managing risk, managing alternatives, and that kind of stuff. So they show up at the check ride, and the DPE puts them in a situation that requires risk analysis and mitigation, and they haven’t been trained for it. Some of them haven’t been given the help by their instructors that they should have [received] in their flight training.

John: There is the possibility that we’re spending too much time teaching skills and not enough time teaching identification and mitigation of risk.

But there’s also the argument that certain skills are lacking in new pilots. 

John: The FAA tends to think of loss of control as something that we need to focus on as a purely physical skill. They talk about stalls and spins, but my feeling about it is that it comes about because someone got themselves in a situation that either they or the airplane can’t handle. And that’s where loss of control comes from. It comes from bad risk management, from getting yourself in a situation where you’re in over your head, and the way to avoid a loss of control situation is don’t get yourself in over your head.

Martha: One of the terms that we use in our FAA risk-management talks is we want flight instructors to help applicants learn about what you might call dangerous neighborhoods, which are situations where it’s almost a setup for a stall-spin on base to final, depending on the winds and speed of the aircraft and so on. And other situations where it’s just inherently risky, and they need to be more alert for potential loss of control. But as John says, what you have to look at is when they’re doing that base-to-final turn and they’re overshooting and trying to tighten it up, is that a physical issue or is it a mental issue where they didn’t properly analyze ahead of time the effect of the downwind, the crosswind. We think a lot of it comes from a failure in risk management rather than a failure in physical control.

What’s your advice to somebody who comes to you and says, “I want to be a pilot. What’s the best way I should go about it?”

Martha: Find a school or instructor, one that fits the time that you want to devote to learning. But make sure, above all, that they have a good syllabus and that they actually follow it. When we got our helicopter training, it took us a while to recognize that the instructor was not following any kind of syllabus or lesson plans, and he was just [saying], “Well, today, I guess we’ll do this.” Even when you teach this stuff, it’s hard to pick up from the get-go that he’s not using a syllabus until you get your nose rubbed into it, and so nothing really happens and comes together. We finally sat down with him and said, “You know, you’re not using the Robinson Helicopter syllabus. You’re not using any syllabus.” And we worked out what we were going to do, and then things went fine. Having a syllabus with lesson plans where the student, or the pilot undergoing flight training, knows when they come in for a lesson what they’re supposed to be doing so they could have studied up on it…knows how to tell if they’ve done well or not done well and and gets feedback immediately on whether they're doing well, is critically important.

John: A guy [we knew] was learning to fly, and they were not using lesson plans. I said, “You know, you’re entitled to have lesson plans. You’re entitled to know what you’re going to learn and what the objective is, and what the elements you're going to cover are. And he said, “I’m just trying to get along,” and he didn’t feel authorized to go to the instructor and say, “I need a lesson plan.” I would tell a student who wants to learn, “It’ll be more fun for you if you know what you’re learning.”

Martha: Not only make sure they have a syllabus and lesson plans, but get a copy of it so that you can see what you’re supposed to be doing. Now, of course, there’s going to be exceptions based on what the weather is, what the mechanical condition of the aircraft is. There’s a lot of variables that can alter that, but you need to know what’s expected.

Another reason that’s important is due to the pipeline to the airlines, because instructors are not sticking around flight schools very long, and if you don’t have a good syllabus with lesson plans and know where you are, then when Instructor A leaves for the airlines and instructor B takes over, they’re not going to know what you’ve done and what you know, and there’s going to be a lot of repetition and frustration.

Are you seeing any trends in the kinds of accidents that we’re seeing in general aviation that point to some areas we need to work on?

John: I think we’re seeing successes. For instance, going into the Hudson River by Sully Sullenberger. They don’t do an ILS [approach] in the Hudson River. He had to do it by looking out the window. People need to learn to fly by what we call “TLAR”—“that looks about right.” That’s a skill that you should graduate with when you learn to fly. You should be able to fly by looking out the window. We saw the case, whether it’s the San Francisco ILS, where the [Asiana Airlines] crew didn’t do it well because they didn’t learn to fly by TLAR and were trying to do a visual approach, and it didn’t come out well. I think there are successes, and we can point to people who have got pilot-in-command capability. One of the difficulties we’re having now is many pilots are soloing with a flight instructor. We’re told that insurance companies are requiring a flight instructor, that they can’t send a person out on their own, and solo. My concern is, do you really have someone who’s able to be a pilot in command of that aircraft, and are you creating a pilot in command when they can’t go out on their own?

Martha: There’s a big difference between going with somebody qualified, sitting there, allegedly keeping their mouth shut in the other seat, and not having anybody else in the airplane with you and understanding that you’re responsible for getting yourself down on the ground alive. A big emotional difference.

DPEs we talked to are complaining about people showing up with almost no real solo time because they’ve got, instead of real PIC time, particularly for the commercial, they've got “acting as PIC” with another pilot on board. People are hoping that maybe the FAA will change that. There’s a rewrite of Part 141 coming up, and they’re hoping that some of that will get changed, but who knows?

John: The risk management has to do with creating a person who's capable of being pilot in command, and one of the skills they need is TLAR.

Martha: A person who is capable of recognizing when the automation in the airplane has turned unreliable and is not doing what is expected or commanded, and is confident enough as PIC to turn the automation off and hand-fly it if they need to. There have been some spectacular accidents, like Air France 447 and some others, where that didn’t happen.

How do we train pilots to handle external pressure?

John: The fundamental thing is you have to figure out an alternative to your problem and be willing to give up on a goal. And you have to have an alternate way to do it.

Martha: Pilots have to be comfortable with the PIC requirement to manage the expectations of their passengers, whether they’re paying or free, whether they’re celebrities or family or just a friend.

John: We need to manage our own goal-setting behavior.