They wanted to look Joshua Knight in the eye and tell him how his callous actions, leaving Mr Pullen for dead after hitting him with his car outside Singleton, had "destroyed" their lives and impacted so many others.

They left Newcastle courthouse with another "kick in the guts" after Knight was jailed for two years and four months, meaning he will be out in less than 12 months.

"Once again, it's the system that has let the families down," Mr Pullen's wife, Vicki Pullen, said outside court. "The last few years have been horrendous. "We've been waiting for them to come forward and then [they are arrested] and they eventually get away with it."

After the shock and heartbreak at learning of Mr Pullen's death at Glenridding in September 2018, his family then had to wait more than two years before anyone was charged.

Knight and Nicole Mason were initially charged with murder, but those charges were reduced significantly after a forensic pathologist found Mr Pullen would have died from the initial impact of the car and not from any other potential attempts to "finish him off'.

During the years since Mr Pullen's death, Vicki said she had lost the family home, battled breast cancer and kept her family together.

So on Tuesday she came to Newcastle courthouse with her son, Cody, and Mr Pullen's mother, Gillian, to have her voice heard and deliver a victim impact statement, only for the defence to attempt to stop her from reading it on a legal technicality.

"What we've been going through has been hell," Vicki said later. "Absolute hell. "And they needed to know that."

Ultimately, Vicki and Gillian were allowed to read what they had prepared and outline the profound impact of Mr Pullen's death.

"You didn't just kill Ian Pullen the day you ran him over, you killed a major part of me," Vicki said.

"Ian had been apart of my life for 25 years. We had been together longer than we had been apart. I was his best friend. I stood by him and raised our children while he became the acclaimed and respected pilot he was.

"All of that was destroyed on September 29, 2018. You destroyed that. Over the past three-and-a-half years I have had to pick up the pieces that you took away from me."

Knight was jailed for a maximum of three years and four months, while Mason - who pleaded guilty to covering up the hit-and-run - was jailed for at least seven months, meaning she will be out of jail in August.