If Collins Radio owned the airline flight deck, then for a generation of pilots flying Cessnas, Pipers and Beechcraft, the panel belonged to one name: King. Climb into almost any light aircraft built between the 1960s and the 1990s and you will likely find a KX 155 nav/comm staring back at you, its green gas-discharge digits glowing above the frequency knob, a KT 76 transponder beside it and a KN 64 DME tucked into the stack. King Radio did for the small aeroplane what Collins did for the airliner, it made reliable, affordable avionics the default fit, and it did so from a converted dairy farmhouse on the edge of Kansas City. This is how it happened.
The man from Jetmore
Edward J. King Jr was born in 1921 on his parents’ farm near Jetmore, in the dry wheat country of western Kansas. He worked his way through Dodge City Junior College and then an engineering degree at Kansas State, graduating in 1943 into a country at war. His first job took him east to RCA, designing aircraft radio equipment for the US Navy, an apprenticeship in exactly the field he would go on to define.
The Midwest pulled him back. In 1948 King founded his first company, Communications Accessories Corporation (CAC), building radio components. And here the story crosses a thread that flyingtin readers will recognise, because the buyer who came knocking in the mid-1950s was none other than Arthur Collins. Collins Radio absorbed CAC, and King stayed on as its president for several more years. He had, in effect, served his time inside the great Cedar Rapids machine — and from the inside he spotted the opening that would make him.
The gap Collins left behind
By the late 1950s Collins Radio was consumed by the booming airline and military business, the high-value, high-volume work that an airliner-and-Pentagon company naturally chases. What Collins could not be bothered to chase was the other end of the market: the explosion of private and light commercial flying in postwar America, where thousands of new aircraft owners wanted radios but could not afford, and did not need, airline-grade gear. The avionics on offer for light aircraft were expensive, bulky and often mediocre.
King, frustrated by exactly this, saw a business hiding in plain sight. In 1959 he left the Collins fold and founded King Radio Corporation to serve the customer the big firms ignored: the owner of a single-engine Cessna who simply wanted a radio that was cheap, light and worked.
Five radios and a farmhouse
He started, as the best of these stories always seem to, in his basement. The first product was the KY 90, a 90-channel crystal-controlled VHF communications transceiver that King designed and hand-built himself. It undercut the competition on price and beat it on clarity, and in its first year King sold exactly five of them, at $845 apiece. It was enough. With orders coming and dealers willing to stock and service the gear, he set up “mass” production in an old dairy farmhouse on the outskirts of Kansas City, shipping on the ground floor, engineering and testing upstairs, spare parts in the attic. By early 1960 he had thirty employees; within a couple of years the operation had outgrown the farmhouse and moved to the site that would become synonymous with the company: Olathe, Kansas.
The culture in those early years became part of the legend. King ran the place like a family firm, kept his best people close, and was famously reachable. Avionics-shop owners of the era tell of phoning Olathe with a problem and getting King himself on the line; one recalls a faulty ADF that, after several failed repairs, prompted a King engineer to tell him simply to take it outside, smash it on the concrete, and wait for the replacement already in the post. That kind of service bought a loyalty the balance sheet could never quite capture.
Silver Crown, Gold Crown and an empire of knobs
What turned King Radio from a clever startup into an institution was relentless, methodical product development across the whole avionics panel. Two product families came to define it. Silver Crown was the line for light general aviation, the radios, transponders, navigation receivers and autopilots that filled the panels of pistons and light twins. Gold Crown sat above it, aimed at the turboprops and business jets that demanded more.
The Silver Crown roll-call reads like an inventory of every flight school and rental ramp of the late twentieth century. The KX 170 and KX 175 nav/comms gave way to the KX 155 and KX 165, which became, by sheer numbers, among the most widely fitted general-aviation radios ever made — workhorses that are still flying, still being repaired, half a century on. Around them King built out the full stack: the KT 76 transponder, the KR 87 digital ADF, the KN 64 DME, the KMA audio panels, the KI-series indicators, the KNS 80 integrated navigation unit, and the KFC and KAP autopilots and flight directors. King supplied them both to the aftermarket and, crucially, straight onto the production lines of Cessna, Piper and Beechcraft, so that a new aeroplane often left the factory wearing King avionics as standard.
The reputation rested on a simple proposition: King gear was good value, it was reliable, and when it did break, the network knew how to fix it. For a private owner watching every dollar, that was the whole game.
Innovating from Kansas
It would be a mistake to file King away as merely the cheap-and-cheerful option. The company was a genuine technical pioneer. As early as 1966 it produced the KTR 900, an all-solid-state transceiver for the airlines at a time when most radios still ran on vacuum tubes. The KDF 800 of 1969 was the first digital automatic direction finder for general aviation. The KX 175, introduced around 1970, was the first low-cost solid-state nav/comm to win FAA technical-standard-order approval, and its derivatives earned a reputation as the most dependable light-aircraft radios of their generation. King was an early and aggressive adopter of large-scale integrated circuits, shrinking the size, weight and cost of avionics while pushing reliability up, exactly the virtues its customers cared about.
The company diversified too, launching a marine-electronics arm in the early 1980s and pushing into military avionics, and by the early 1980s annual sales were approaching $100 million from a sprawl of plants across Kansas. When satellite navigation arrived, the lineage continued under the successor brand with the KLN family of GPS units, the KLN 89, 90 and 94, that brought GPS into thousands of light-aircraft panels.
The sale, and the birth of Bendix/King
By the mid-1980s King Radio was a prize, and the consolidating aerospace giants came calling. The acquirer was Allied, the conglomerate that had, in the famous corporate battle of 1983, swallowed the Bendix Corporation, parent of the venerable Bendix Radio avionics division.
A word on Bendix is owed here, because its name now sat alongside King’s. Vincent Bendix had built an empire first in brakes and then in aviation; the Bendix Radio division, formed in 1937, became a dominant supplier of military flight electronics, reputedly furnishing the majority of the electronic equipment aboard American aircraft in the Second World War, and after the war moved into general-aviation radios, weather radar and instruments of its own.
Allied combined its two general-aviation avionics houses, Bendix and King, into a single operation marketed under the Bendix/King name, pairing the established Bendix pedigree with King’s commanding share of the light-aircraft panel. Ed King sold his company in 1985 and retired. The corporate parent kept evolving around the brand: Allied merged with the Signal Companies in late 1985 to form Allied-Signal, which streamlined to AlliedSignal in 1993, and then in 1999 merged with Honeywell and took the Honeywell name. Through every one of those reshufflings the BendixKing brand survived, because the recognition and loyalty it carried among pilots were worth too much to throw away. To this day, BendixKing remains Honeywell’s general-aviation avionics line.
Legacy
Ed King’s afterlife was as varied as his radios. King avionics rode in the panel of Burt Rutan’s Voyager when it circled the globe nonstop and unrefuelled in 1986, one of the defining feats of light aviation. In 1991 King joined his son to found the King Estate Winery in Oregon, which grew into one of that state’s largest. He collected the National Business Aviation Association’s honours, its Meritorious Service award in 1988 and a special First Century of Flight award in 2003, and died in 2012, at ninety, hailed as one of the most important figures in the history of modern avionics.
His real monument, though, is harder to put in a display case and impossible to miss. It is the green glow of a KX 155 in ten thousand cockpits, the reassuring click of a King frequency knob, the panel that a generation of pilots learned to fly behind. Arthur Collins built a company on the conviction that communication was worth perfecting at any price; Ed King built his on the equally radical idea that it should be perfected at a price the ordinary pilot could actually pay. Between them, the two Kansas-and-Iowa neighbours wired the American sky, Collins up high, King down low, and the evidence is still bolted into instrument panels the world over.
Corporate lineage current as of mid-2026: the BendixKing brand, successor to King Radio Corporation, operates as part of Honeywell Aerospace.
