John King has been continuously involved in aviation since 1965, and he started learning to fly the following year in a civilian flying club Auster with air force instructors. His photojournalism career, specialising in aviation, began in 1972, and since the mid-1980s John has written nine books, including New Zealand Tragedies: Aviation Accidents and Disasters, and co-authored two more aviation histories.
His biggest aviation adventure was helping fly a Cessna 195 floatplane from an upstate New York lake all the way to Seattle, WA in 1984, taking in Oshkosh along the way and briefly flying in formation with an A-10 Warthog.
As well as editing the quarterly Sport Flying for more than 20 years from 1997, he edited the monthly New Zealand Aviation News from 2008 until it ceased publication shortly after its 2021 takeover and conversion to paywall online.
Rising costs, bureaucracy and the lack of time and ready access to an aircraft for staying current led to John’s hanging up his headset in 2008. In his retirement he now edits the NZ Aviation Historical Society’s quarterly journal The Aero Historian.
