BIANCA RHODES, BBA ’81, had been running her consulting business for 17 years when she met the founder of Knight Aerospace—a potential new client—in the winter of 2014. Rhodes had not planned to launch a new career, but with an Ebola outbreak raging in West Africa and Knight’s plans to create a biocontainment unit to fly patients during future outbreaks, she saw the potential to one day save lives. 

The arrival of the highly contagious and deadly Ebola virus coincided with Knight’s ambitious idea and underscored a long-overdue need for an aircraft-compatible medical module. It would be like a portable hospital room that could transport patients without risking exposure to the medical staff or flight crew members. 

“The idea of starting something combining military medicine and aerospace manufacturing was very intriguing. And it had a great purpose—being able to move and treat patients in a safe environment that was more like a hospital,” Rhodes says, explaining why she was drawn to the business. 

A former banker with no experience in aerospace engineering, Rhodes was inspired to reinvent her consulting career. The medical mission would make a difference, a big difference. She sprang into action, founding a new company dedicated to the design of medical modules, which Knight Aerospace would then manufacture and sell to its customer base. Three years later, she bought out Knight Aerospace and merged it with her company. It was a “friendly” merger through which some members of the Knight family, who founded the company, remained on board. Rhodes is Knight Aerospace’s president and CEO.

During the next few years, the company’s office space quadrupled, and its staff grew from 16 employees to about 100.

“I had to put systems in place—processes and automation,” Rhodes says, as well as reconfiguring the company’s business strategy. “It’s been developing new products. It’s been shifting us from a kind of a structures company to an innovation company. It’s been making the (U.S.) government a bigger part of our equation.”

The reinvention required her to learn a new industry on the fly.

For some, attempting to achieve this kind of transformation, combined with learning the ins and outs of a new industry, might seem like an insurmountable task. But Rhodes, who sought advice from Paul K. Carlton Jr., a former surgeon-general of the U.S. Air Force, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saw that she could help revolutionize air medical transport to make patients more comfortable. She wanted to mitigate the spread of disease in the event of a global pandemic, which the CDC was anticipating, she says, but also improve medical treatment for military personnel wounded in combat.

“Up to this point, we have slung our soldiers on the back of cargo aircraft, which, by definition, are meant for cargo, so they’re dirty. They have no controlled environment,” Rhodes says. “I thought, ‘If we could do that better, that would be great.’”

Talent, leadership, community

To Rhodes’ colleagues, longtime friends, and mentors, her drive and determination come as no surprise. Neither does her willingness to take on challenges—and deliver above all expectations. That drive extends beyond her professional career to her work with community-based nonprofits. In recognition of this work, the San Antonio Business Journal named Rhodes “Woman of the Year” in 2021.

“Bianca has an incredible ability to communicate, and she is one of the greatest consensus builders that I’ve ever met,” says Tyler Schroeder, senior manager of government operations at Boeing, who succeeded Rhodes as the volunteer chair of the Dee Howard Foundation, an aerospace education nonprofit. “She is pulling everyone else up around her. She is constantly trying to provide opportunity.”

After shepherding the foundation through a particularly difficult transition in 2021, Schroeder says, in 2023 Rhodes created its signature program, teaching students to operate drones. It began with a conversation about an aircraft-building program the organization had established at a San Antonio-area high school. The program was too costly to replicate at multiple schools, but Rhodes had an idea. 

“What if we introduced a program that allowed students to learn about drones, work with drones, get the same exposure points as they would with an aircraft-build program?” she asked, as Schroeder recalls. “Within a few months after that very initial conversation, we had the first agreement with a high school to implement this drone program.”

Now embedded in 13 schools, the program consists of a precommercial curriculum for middle school students and a two-year commercial curriculum for high school students. In the commercial program, students learn to operate drones in accordance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and can even obtain a commercial drone license—potentially opening future career paths. 

Rhodes, who began volunteering in community-based organizations shortly after graduating from McCombs, has also been involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas, Junior Achievement of South Texas, San Antonio AirLIFE, Baptist Health Systems, and San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. In 2013 she co-founded a ministry called Any Woman Can, an initiative that grew out of her volunteer work as a counselor in pregnancy care centers. 

“What I found was that a lot of women needed counseling, and there was no free counseling,” Rhodes says, adding that she noticed women were struggling with decisions ranging from how to deal with relationships to career choices. “And they were making pretty important life decisions without having somebody to talk to.”

A trajectory of success 

As for determining her own career path, Rhodes says, the first decision she made after earning a business degree was simple: Follow the money. The first in her family to attend college, she remembers that what she wanted to be was “not poor.” 

“I didn’t have any exposure to any business people, but I looked around my little town and the wealthier people were bankers,” Rhodes says of growing up in Weslaco in the Rio Grande Valley. “I thought finance seemed to make a whole lot of sense. I loved working with numbers.”

She landed a job with the National Bank of Commerce. As she recalls, she was one of only two female commercial lenders in all of San Antonio, and the only one who was Latina. Around the same time, a senior bank executive connected her with bank board member Marty Wender, BBA ’69. 

Wender, a real estate developer known for reshaping San Antonio with high-profile mixed-use developments such as Westover Hills and Crownridge, says this senior bank executive asked him to “introduce (Rhodes) to people to help get her career started” because he believed she had “three strikes” against her: She was young, female, and Latina. But as far as Wender could see, Rhodes had more potential than anyone else coming out of young banker training. 

“She was also smarter than anybody in the bank,” Wender says. “I felt like I was being asked to coach Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods.” 

Wender would become one of Rhodes’ mentors as she moved up the career ladder, introducing her to San Antonio business world heavyweights such as Red McCombs, who would become one of her good friends and mentors, and former USAA CEO Robert McDermott.

Rhodes left the National Bank of Commerce to take on a role as chief financial officer at TexCom Management, where she worked under the president and chief operating officer, Richard Wilson, BBA ’63. Wilson, who also became a mentor, remembers the ease with which Rhodes expanded the company’s lender base, playing the lead role in negotiating a $50 million line of credit with the Bank of New England. 

“She was not afraid of anything, and her banking background and connections equipped her very well for all of that, especially the needs that we had,” says Wilson, who continued working with Rhodes after TexCom was acquired by Intelogic Trace. “What still impresses me about her are her personality and her initiative and leadership within the San Antonio-area business communities.”

From Intelogic, a company owned by the famous financier Asher Edelman, who was the model for the fictional Wall Street giant Gordon Gekko, Rhodes went on to become CFO of Kinetic Concepts Inc. She had taken that company public during her time at the National Bank of Commerce. 

“They were in trouble, and so they called me in and said, ‘Can you help us turn the company around?’” Rhodes remembers. “I did the turnaround. It was a great experience.” 

At the age of 34, Rhodes decided to “retire” to raise her three young children. But Rhodes soon realized she could not completely step away from the business world. About five years later, she started Crossroads Consulting, the firm that would eventually lead her to Knight Aerospace. 

A new chapter 

Rhodes says one of her favorite success stories involves Knight Aerospace’s pivot during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company went from building a generic medical module to building a biomedical containment module and delivering it to the Royal Canadian Air Force. 

“We had to shift it to a medical-grade room that protected the air crew and the medical crew from patients that were contagious with COVID,” Rhodes says. “And within months, which was pretty spectacular during COVID, to build a whole airworthy structure that goes on the back of an aircraft.”

After flight crews flew the medical module to Tunisia to retrieve an officer and his family who were severely ill with COVID and fly them back to Canada, Rhodes received a thank you letter crediting the company with saving the patients’ lives. 

Knight Aerospace makes a variety of structures that can roll on and off a plane, transforming it into a state-of-the-art ambulance, a laboratory, a galley, or even a VIP room. In August, the company handed off three products to its biggest client, the U.S. government: a smaller, more versatile version of its medical module that is meant for the treatment of special forces, a transformer-like forklift for loading and unloading cargo in places with unreliable infrastructure, and a rocket cargo container for space missions. 

So far, Knight has delivered products to 37 countries, and it continues to grow. Asked what gives her the confidence to continue reaching for new challenges, Rhodes says her team always aims to stay one step ahead. 

“I’m very blessed,” she says. “When I have goals for any of the different aspects of my life, whether it’s my community work or my business, I figure out what needs to be done, when, and I create a team around me that can proactively manage it.”