Executive Profile: Bianca Rhodes charts her own pioneering path at Knight Aerospace

Bianca Rhodes grew up "dirt poor" in the Rio Grande Valley, the first in her family to graduate from high school and college. Today, she's CEO of San Antonio-based Knight Aerospace, which designs and manufactures custom modules for military cargo aircraft.

Rhodes recently joined fellow women tech leaders Melissa Unsell-Smith, president of document cleaning company Rectify, and Alejandra Zertuche, CEO of cloud-based school program performance platform Enflux, at a Geekdom-hosted panel about the trends and future of the tech industry. During the event she shared advice on her path of re-launching Knight Aerospace and developing its medical and VIP modules for aircraft and other palletized systems, now sold to more than 34 countries.

Her journey started after she earned a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin and launched her career in San Antonio as senior vice president of commercial lending for the National Bank of Commerce. She next held chief financial officer positions with several companies, including TexCom, a computer leasing company, Intellogic Trace, and Kinetic Concepts Inc. In 1997, she left the corporate world to "retire" and stay home with her three small children.

"It didn't last very long," Rhodes said.

Itching to get back into the workforce, she started a consulting business, Crossroad Consulting, in the late 1990s. This gave her a flexible schedule for her kids for the next 17 years. After her youngest went to college, she began taking full-time consulting positions.

In 2013 Rhodes met Alfred Knight, founder of Knight Aerospace, which had been in business for more than 20 years making ground support equipment for aircraft. The next year, she partnered with the company's owners to form a partner company, Knight Aerospace Medical Systems, to pursue a plan to manufacture a medical module to transport patients.

Three years later, prompted by Alfred Knight's retirement, the two companies combined with Rhodes buying out the assets and putting the whole business under one roof. In September 2017 Rhodes became CEO of Knight Aerospace.

Rhodes moved the company to Port San Antonio in 2019, doubling the company's space, going from 40,000 to 80,000 feet. Today, Knight Aerospace has expanded still further into a 160,000-square-foot space with more than 40 employees.

The original design for the company's medical module was developed in 2014, in the wake of ebola pandemic. At the time, future pandemics were at the forefront of manufacturing minds, but over time the idea was placed on the back burner.

Then Covid hit.

Since the Vietnam War, said Rhodes, transporting medically compromised patients has been done primarily by helicopter or "slinging patients in the back of a cargo aircraft."

There's no air conditioning, heating or lighting in a cargo aircraft, Rhodes said. It's loud and hard for caregivers to hear the patient. They have to wear headphones to talk to each other, and equipment is essentially stacked on top of the patient.

Knight Aerospace's model offers a real hospital setting that rolls onto the aircraft. It locks into the cargo aircraft and is built to the same specifications as the aircraft. It's connected to the plane's power and communication system, so the pilot can directly talk to the patients and caregivers in the module. It's got temperature, directed airflow and vibration control.

Knight Aerospace built and sold its first medical module to the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2021, delivering it in January 2021.

The cost of operating a cargo aircraft is about the same as the cost of operating a helicopter, about $30,000 a trip, according to Rhodes — but a helicopter can transport only one patient at a time, while the Knight module can transport 20.

Jim Perschbach, president and CEO of Port San Antonio, said Rhodes harnessed the company's core strengths and raised the brand's visibility in a few short years. He praised her ability to make the state-of-the-art aeromedical module a reality in a short period of time.

Rhodes said when she started working for Knight Aerospace, the company had been in existence for 23 years and the only woman who had ever worked for the company was a receptionist. But now, about 20% of her workforce is women.

"My whole career I have really enjoyed being the only woman or being one of the few," she said. "It just helps you stand out and make a name for yourself (and) not get lost in the crowd."

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