His name was Mike Longhurst.
Well it’s rarely possible to state exactly what set off a chain of events.
You might argue that if Mike had not died in 1999 the two companies would not have fallen out. If they had not fallen out they would not have broken up the trading partnership and SFT would not have needed to set up its own ground school. There would then have been no copyright arguments and no legal battles, no expensive legal costs and no loss of focus on the primary businesses.
In the current case if there had been no downturn in the world economy there would have been no downturn in the ATPL student numbers. There would then have been no need for IDC to demand a larger share of the profits. So there would be no need for the two companies to fall out and there would be no need for ……