182. From the Ground Up: The Untold Success Story of Bianca Rhodes and Knight Aerospace
This week on bigcitysmalltown, we turn our attention to Knight Aerospace—an innovative San Antonio company with a global footprint, yet little name recognition. Based at Port San Antonio, Knight Aerospace specializes in creating advanced modular systems for military and government aircraft, enabling rapid transformation for missions ranging from medical evacuations to VIP transport.
Bob sits down with Bianca Rhodes, CEO and president of Knight Aerospace, to examine her journey from the Rio Grande Valley to the helm of a company at the intersection of manufacturing, medicine, and aviation. The discussion traces the company’s evolution, how the region’s educational and business infrastructure shapes its workforce, and where San Antonio fits in the broader aerospace and biomedical landscape.
They discuss:
• The origins and unique business model of Knight Aerospace
• How the company pivoted during the Ebola and COVID-19 crises
• The realities—and opportunities—facing women in aerospace and manufacturing in San Antonio
• San Antonio’s economic and educational challenges, and what’s needed for the city to reach its potential
• Rhodes’ faith and commitment to educational outreach, workforce development, and her work with local nonprofits
For those interested in how local industry, education, and civic leadership intersect in San Antonio’s growth story, this conversation provides a grounded look at both the possibilities and the obstacles ahead.
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Welcome to Big City Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard, and this week's guest is Bianca Rhodes, the CEO and president and majority shareholder of Knight Aerospace at Port San Antonio, maybe the most interesting and important company in San Antonio that you might not know very much about, but you're gonna learn more about it here in the next 45 minutes. Bianca, welcome to Big City Small Town. Thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast. I've been watching some of the older ones that I had missed at some point. You've had amazing guests and great stories, so I'm just super honored to be part of that. I'm glad to hear people say that the podcast now has older episodes. That means we've been around for a while. 3 years and counting. So tell us a little bit about your origin story, because I admire greatly the fact that you came out of the Rio Grande Valley. and have had the extraordinary success you've had. And you're at a really cool aerospace company, but you're not an engineer. Your background's in banking and finance. Right. And yet somehow you worked your way in here and you've taken a company that was owned by its founders and started in the 1990s and you've built it into something really remarkable. Yeah, well, thank you so much. And you've done some homework for sure. Oh yeah. But yeah, I grew up down in the Valley, dirt poor. Didn't know anything about business, but knew I wanted to be in business. When you're dirt poor, you become obsessed with money. So I thought banking would be the way to go. So after UT in Austin, I got a bank— got a job with National Bank of Commerce here in San Antonio, which was then the second largest bank. I became a commercial lender, one of 2 in San Antonio at that time, which is really funny to think about. A quieter downtown. I know, very much so. But You know, got to meet a lot of different businesses and loved it, loved it, and became very close to a lot of my customers. So, took one of them public, KCI, Kinetic Concepts, eventually— Dr. Leninger's company? Yep, yep, yep. And our friend, now passed, Denny Ware, the former CEO? Yes, exactly. So that was one of them. The other one was Inlogic Trace, which was a spinoff of Datapoint. And then, when I turned— I went in to do the turnaround for KCI. took it back private. And when I did, I was able to retire at the age of 34 after having been the CFO of 2 publicly traded companies. And I thought I would raise my kids. And so I stayed home for 17 years, but didn't think just raising my kids was the right thing for me to do. So I ended up starting a consulting company. And so I consulted for 17 years. And by that time, my youngest was off in college. And so I was consulting full-time, and I met Knight Aerospace, and the owner founder had the majority shares, but wanted to do a medical module. They had just delivered a VIP module to the Sultan of Oman, who travels with his physician, and it was during Ebola, and so he wanted more medical capabilities, and so the company was interested in doing that, but they had no idea about medical evacuation and medical anything, and— Did you? Hardly, but I was faking it really well. I had helped stand up the rescue service in San Antonio, San Antonio AirLife, and so I knew a lot of the medical evacuation community, and a lot of former military because a lot of those jobs were now being staffed by San Antonio AirLife. I was part of the Baptist Healthcare Organization. I was on their board of trustees, so I had a lot of medical and medical evacuation, just enough to— like, you know, be dangerous. But this company was so cool. It was manufacturing. It was military. It was medical. And this was during Ebola. So the concept of— This was about, what, 10 or 12 years ago? Yeah, it was in 2014. 2014. Yep, yep, yep. And I learned in that experience that we were taking our soldiers and putting them on the back of cargo aircraft and flying them around the world. So we have burned soldiers from our hospitals in Germany that we were flying to Bamsee on the back of a dirty cargo aircraft, 16-hour flight with no lighting, no temperature control, like super unsanitary. And so part of my diligence, I went to the CDC, went to the State Department, and I asked them, how important is this concept? You know, will we ever want to move people to differently than we do today. And they said, oh, we're going to have a pandemic at some point, and it's going to be global, so we will need something like this. And so I became encouraged and excited. So I started a separate company because Al wanted to keep his ownership, and about 3 years later, I was able to buy him out and took over as CEO. Let's back up a little bit. First of all, you were raised in West Laco in the Valley, not far from the Texas-Mexico border. Right. You must have been dreaming big, and you must have had parents that put a lot of value in you getting an education. You know, unfortunately, that's a little different than reality. Well, tell us. In my culture, my telling my parents that I was going to move out of the home and move to Austin and go to college did not go over well. They thought I had bad intentions, and who leaves their family? And, You just need to go get a job at the 7-Eleven and support the family. And it was a struggle. Now, you know, now my mom and I are very close, and she's very proud of what I've done. But, at the time, it was a hard thing. I mean, it was— I bummed a ride to college. That still exists, Bianca, in the culture, unfortunately. Yes, it does. We hear episodically about parents discouraging their— particularly women— from leaving the city and attending college out of market. Right. Yeah, it's very unfortunate. That's one of the reasons I spend a lot of time in the educational community, you know, trying to tell the story, trying to give kids alternatives, both from an educational standpoint and a career standpoint, because I just had no idea. And if it wasn't for close friends of mine who had older siblings that had gone to college, I wouldn't have figured it out. I was just super blessed to have great people in my life that showed me the way. And then, you know, I just, I don't know, I figured it out somehow, thankfully. And you're a graduate of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin, which is a first-class business school, and you acquired the considerable skills to take a public company back private again. We're talking about Kinetic Concepts, and that's a company, for members of our audience that don't know, that originally built customized hospital beds and moved into wound care. That was exactly my tenure at Kinetic Concepts. When I first met them, they were building these specialty hospital beds, mostly for immobile patients, to help drain the lungs so they would oscillate and help patients not to develop pneumonia, and it was a hard business model because they were selling these to hospitals, and so it was capital equipment. It was really hard to get it financed, and I came in as their banker and figured out, with the CEO, a way for us to build an inventory of leasing products, products. So we started renting them to hospitals, which was a lot easier for them to afford. But eventually, when, you know, 7 years later, when I came in to help turn around the company because it wasn't doing very well, what I learned was that what KCI was doing really, really well is taking care of wounds because those patients all develop wounds from not having enough movement in their body. Dressures and other things like that. Exactly. And these nurses, were super experts all over the world about how to care for a wound. So I did. I started a project with something that would today be an iPad, and I put them in the hands of all of these nurses, and I got them to accumulate data about how you treat for wounds. We transformed the company from a bed company to a wound care company. That's amazing. Yeah, it was really fun, and it was so much more popular. so much more impactful. And without poking my nose too far into your, you know, your personal finances, you obviously probably acquired wealth through that process, which allowed you to retire. And I bring that up because I just think as a role model, people should look at you and realize— I'm talking about high school girls and others— Sure. That they can achieve what you achieved. Yeah, it can be done. It can be done. I mean, it took a lot of work. Most of my career has been in a place where women are generally not. Aerospace, commercial banking, especially back then. I was one of 2 commercial lenders that were women in San Antonio. But, you know, it's belief in yourself and trust in God and working super, super hard, and it pays off, and anybody can do it. I believe that. That's wonderful. And for people that don't know very much about Knight Aerospace, let me note that you don't build aircraft. What you do is you take aircraft that basically are shells And you provide modules that can be put pretty quickly into those mostly military and government aircraft, I think. Yes. And literally, you can put a module in that seats X amount of people in coach seating. You can put a module in that's VIP and all first class with all the amenities that anyone airborne could possibly want for a price. And then finally, maybe most importantly, you put in flying hospitals and medical clinics in a module. Those can be pulled right back out. So I assume your leasing model has transferred over to Knight Aerospace. Yeah. We are actually working on leasing today, but mostly we've been selling. Really? But yeah, you know, it's kind of different in the military than it is in industry. And so actually buying makes more sense. We have product in 39 countries, and most of them are used to purchasing. The militaries are more used to purchasing than they are renting. They're just now opening their apertures a little bit more towards rentals of different types of equipment, especially things like medical modules, because when you don't need them, they're sitting idly. But what we're discovering, like, we have 2 biomedical containment units in Canada. They just ordered, we're in the process of a 3rd one for them, because they use it all the time. Is that the Royal Canadian Air Force? Yes. 'Cause I know you started with them, but you also have a big deal with the Brazilian Embraer, right? Yes, yeah, Embraer has the newest cargo aircraft Okay. And so, we've just forged a long-term, 20-year relationship, a partnership with them, where we are furnishing the mission set for their new cargo aircraft. So, not just the modules, but all kinds of seating pallets, and galleys, and lavatories, and ground support equipment, and other things to completely make that airplane as leveraged as possible. to do as many different kinds of missions as they need them to do. How about your neighbor at Port San Antonio, Boeing, which also handles Air Force One and other government planes, their maintenance, and maybe they did the build-out on the Qatar gift, I don't know, but do you do any business with them, or if some tech billionaire wants a small medical clinic on his 737, do you do that kind of work? Well, we do. I mean, the last VIP module we delivered to the Sultan of Oman, So there's a bunch of heads of state. We had one flying in the United States for over 30 years. So some of them are because, like in the case of the Sultan, he wanted to visit the tribes, but he had to fly a C-130 because it's the only thing that can land on sand, unimproved runways. But he wanted to fly with his staff and in luxury. So we built something for that. In the United States, we had one so that you could— Yeah. The person could be on a C-17, and you would not know that they're there. You can share with us who that is, if you'd like, Bianca. Yeah. It's people with really big titles in the United States, but they would have a shower. They would have a bed. They would have full communications capability to communicate with anybody in the world, but they'd fly incognito. How do you do all that with a— you have less than 100 employees, right? I do. I have about 100 right now. And are they all— what would we see if we walked onto the factory floor today, if we were out there with you? What are they building? And is there some massive supply chain that's bringing in all these hospital and medical and luxury items from elsewhere that they're assembling? Yeah. No, we build everything from the ground up. So the secret sauce tonight is that we build all of our structures exactly to the same standards that the aircraft is built to. And you fabricate out there? We do. We do everything ourselves, like 99%. We outsource very little of our processes. through manufacture. We consider ourselves an innovation company because we're always designing new, interesting products that are needed. So we design everything. We build it from the ground up. These modules will roll onto the aircraft, like you said, very rapidly, will hook up to power and communications is the only thing that they ever need. Other than that, they're completely independent, and they're ready to go. But they perform with the aircraft. So the same deflection and everything with the aircraft. So they have to be very sophisticated. Right. sophisticated structures, but they're intended for people and patients. So they need to be safe during all phases of flight— taxi, takeoff, and landing. And most structures are cargo. So this is a very different animal. And so we take a lot of pride in that. We don't have a lot of competition. It's a very small niche. But if you came over tonight, you'd see 160,000 square feet, about 100 employees, Each one of them is handpicked and great, because when you only have 100 employees, every one counts. Are there people that skilled that walk through the door, or do you have to train people? I'm guessing that you don't get people from Ready to Work, the city's job input. We don't, although we have been, I will tell you, over the 12 years that I've been there, we have trained a lot of people, and for a while there, I didn't have the budget to command, you know, the people with great skills that had a lot of experience, So I had to take people on the lower end of the pay scale and train them and develop their careers. So I gave them, you know, great opportunities in their careers, but they gave us, you know, great skill sets. Now, today we're so busy that we can't afford to train as much. So we are looking for people that have, you know, some skill set already, engineers that have been in aerospace or in medical, and metal mechanics that have done this before, cabinetmakers that have, you know, You know, these guys are real craftsmen, really, really good craftsmen. And we have a great workforce. We have very little turnover because we do, you know, if you want to be bored, you go to the big companies and you do the same thing over and over again. If you want to have a lot of variety in what you're doing, you come to Knight Aerospace. Like, we design a hospital room and then we design the cargo container for rockets. Have you found room for other women, Bianca, to join the company? Yeah, so when I met Knight, they had only had one woman ever And that was the receptionist. And yeah, so now out of the 100, I probably have 20, 22 women. Really hard to find, but I've had sheet metal mechanics. I have engineers. I have a lot of back office people that help, accountants and HR and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it was a struggle at the beginning. It was a very male— it is a very male industry for sure. So are engineering schools. Exactly. We talked before off microphone about how much the COVID pandemic changed the orientation of the company, your focus, et cetera. How do you build in a contained space like an airplane a facility that can transport biohazard or people with highly infectious diseases, Ebola? Right now we've seen another outbreak of that. Keeping the crew and others safe. Are the people loading and unloading? Yeah. It was a challenge. And when COVID hit, we were already designed— we had already designed and were building a universal module for injury and illness, not biomedical. And we immediately pivoted and said, we have to design for biomedical. And so we brought in a lot of experts. I have a lot of great medical people in my wake that have helped contribute to— Any from Texas Biomed? San Antonio? Not from Texas Biomed, but we work with a lot of the military, so one of the persons, for instance, that advises me is the former 3-star general of the US Air Force, the Surgeon General of the US Air Force. He designed the system that the world uses for medical evacuation in the military. It doesn't get much better than that, and so we put, everybody was all hands on deck, let's design this thing, and then I was very fortunate to have friends like Adam Hamilton at Swiri, who I called and I said, I have to test this module. It has to contain all the contaminants. It has to. And will you do it for us? It has to work. And will you do it for little Knight Aerospace? And he stepped up, and they did a great job of testing our module, ensuring that we were going to capture all of the contaminants and not let them out of that module. Well, the Southwest Research Institute, like Knight Aerospace, is one of the great unsung centers of excellence in our city. They are. We are so blessed to have them. I think it's just a well-kept secret, for sure. So, what inquiring minds want to know is, will Knight Aerospace ever contemplate going public? I don't think I would take it public, but, you know, all the options are always on the table, but I do plan to sell the company. This is, you know, I don't keep this secret. You have to grow or go, right? Right. You know, I'm the first one to say that I've taken the company to where I think I can take it, and I'd love to see it in the hands of somebody else who can take it to the next level, just like KCI. It's great fun to be able to do that. All my employees have equity, so they all know this is the plan, and we're all working together to make that successful, and I have some stringent criteria. I'm not gonna sell to anybody who's gonna shut San Antonio down, who's gonna eliminate jobs. Good for you. Yeah, yeah, no, I need it. We all need it. The community needs it to succeed in San Antonio, and we've got great things on the table right now that could make the company much bigger, even in the short run. I think it's a great story and it has such opportunity to go to the next level and be just an even better story, even more than KCI. Wouldn't it be hard to achieve that scale without going to the capital markets? I don't know. There are some really strong companies that understand what Knight brings to the table, who I think would really like to own and control the company and could take it to the next level. So it is possible that we, you know, we could go public. That's not— but I'm planning to do it sooner rather than later, and that's a process that takes a little bit longer, and I'm not sure that I have the business model quite yet. I think I'd have to stick around a little bit longer and develop it a little bit more if I wanted to take it public. So right now, it seems to me that a strategic buyer is more the answer. But like I said, all the options are on the table. I feel like we're breaking big news here. Well, we're not. Elon Musk, are you listening? Really? Go ahead. Yeah. Who are your competitors? Because you must face some threats out there in the free market. Yeah. So there is one company who we have lost 2 projects to. They had never done anything like that, like what we do. And the first project was 4 years past its delivery date. A little schadenfreude there? Yeah. And so, we do, but nobody can say that they've had product flying successfully for 33 years, not even close. Nobody can say that they have built the breadth of products that we have, like you said, from hospital rooms to Cargo containers for rockets. Like, we are, I think, the specialist in structure. So we tend to— this is like, this is why Elon should be interested in Knight Aerospace. Most of our contracts are sole source to us because there's nobody else in the market that can bring that to the table. Interesting. Yeah. Well, beyond Knight Aerospace, we've talked about your success. You've given a lot back to the community. You started your own nonprofit, and I want you to talk about that, but you're kind of an in-demand board member, too, for a lot of the well-known nonprofits in the city. And I just wonder what guides you philosophically toward what you do or don't do and talk about your nonprofit. Sure. There's 2 things. First is my faith. And that really is the guiding light. You're wearing a beautiful crucifix that we can see. Thank you. Yeah, you know, God has been good to me. And I understand his presence and his provision in my life more than anybody because I have been amazingly blessed. Were you raised in faith like that? I was raised Catholic. And when I— Typical of the Valley. Right, right, right. Exactly. And then in college, went through kind of a journey to figure out, then I discovered the Bible, which was like this amazing thing. And I went to the other extreme. I became Southern Baptist for a while. And so, now I'm non-denominational. I'm a strong Christian. One of the things that I felt passionately about was that We did not have counseling for young women who were making bad choices, and women who were looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong ways. And so, yes, I started a ministry, AWC Centers. What does that stand for, the acronym? It stood for Any Woman Can, but we shortened it to AWC. And so, we have 2 sites in San Antonio. We see thousands of women. We help them make better decisions. The big thing we do is we give free counseling. Where are the sites, if I can ask? Yeah. One is in North Central, like Blanco and Huebner, and the other one is downtown at First Press. You know, it's really important. We've seen a lot of women. We've given many, many thousands of hours of free counseling, and we've had a lot of women who have turned their lives around, a lot of women who work in the sex industry, a lot of women who, you know, are in abusive relationships, who are just making better decisions about what their life looks like and their value. As daughters of the King. And we see a lot of men, too. We do a lot of testing. You know, we try to be nonjudgmental, come alongside and love people who are looking for love in all the wrong places. I had to say that. What kind of testing? We do STD testing, pregnancy testing, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. But the leading service is free counseling. And are you the sole funder of that, or has it developed its own independent ability to operate as a freestanding nonprofit? Oh, yeah. No, it's been— I think I founded it 14 years ago now, and I rolled off the board probably 5 years into it, and we were totally self-sustained at that point, and it's done very, very well. It has a lot of support from the community and great staff, and it's been doing terrific, and I'm super proud of it. Well, you should be. That's really impressive. I'm really glad to hear you say that contemplating an eventual sale of the company That you would hold strong on keeping it and the jobs and the people that have made the company in San Antonio. Yes. What are your views about the overall city right now? We're facing a very unusual situation, and both the city and county are struggling with budget deficits. Almost every school district has a budget deficit. They're all required by the Texas Constitution to, to balance their budgets. They can't operate in the red. It's an interesting time. On the one hand, the state's the fastest-growing one in the country, and the economy is robust. But on the other hand, real estate prices are down, consumer confidence is down, and so are sales tax collections. So we're short of money, and the cutting knife is out. My second passion after my faith that you were asking me about is really, you know, I'm a capitalist. I am, you know, I am the poster child for how good it can be for entrepreneurs, and I would love to see the city do more of that. But the economic engine, the business community, has to grow, and for that to happen, we have to have the right educational system. Kids need to know that is the way to do it, and not necessarily for everybody. I mean, there's a lot of great ideas coming from trades and other things that are also necessary, but that is one avenue that that really does open the aperture for young people to understand how they could have a bigger impact in the world. And so, a lot of my time is spent in education. You know, we're at Port San Antonio, which used to be Kelly Air Force Base. Mm-hmm. I am surrounded by students whose parents and grandparents worked at Kelly Air Force Base, yet they do not know the educational or career opportunities that they have. So I spend a lot of time with the schools educating them, teaching kids about aerospace and aviation and all the different careers that it can mean. It's really important, and I think, as a city, to be honest with you, I'm frustrated with the city. I think, you know, I think we should have been Austin. I think we should still be better than Austin. It's more affordable. It has a better culture. It's a better place to raise your family. I don't know that we tell that story strongly enough, but what Austin has done really well is tapped into that economic engine and really attracted and retained the businesses by selling this, you know, sexier story about it. It's more fun to live there, and it is, maybe, if you're a young person, but when you want to raise your family, you might think differently about that, so I think there's a story still there that is not being told as robustly as it could be, and I think the business community, you know, there was a day, in my day, like, I was so blessed. My lifetime mentor is Marty Winder. His mentor was Red McCombs, so I got to fly in with the McD's and the Bob Harry's and the Tom Frost's. There was a leadership team in the city that made things happen, And I think that we need to step up as leaders in this community and be faithful to our community and help build that and have the same vision that some of our, you know, giants had at that time and make things happen. But one of the things that was different back then, and this is, you know, this is worrisome, too, is that the business community worked in lockstep with city government. I mean, Henry Cisneros was hugely responsible for that. Right. That dynamic, working with the business community and creating those visions and moving in the same direction. And I just don't think that we have quite that unity that we should have in order to— for us to capitalize on what a great city this could be. We need to work on education attainment, because when you compare the higher ed and the technology, technical certifications in Austin compared to San Antonio— For sure. It's not a good number. It's not. I'm really hopeful that the combination of UTSA and the Health Science Center is going to make a big difference there. I think we have opportunities with UTSA. Alamo Colleges brings a lot to the table, but, yeah, the presence of the University of Texas in Austin makes a big difference in the city. There's no question about it, but for the age of UTSA, It's doing really well. We just need to catch up. I promised President Taylor-Amy that every time somebody says UTSA on the podcast, I'll say UT San Antonio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quote the new brand. Yeah, yeah. But I know I take your point. Yeah. That is a remarkable merger that's occurred and it's gotten a lot of national attention, and I think rightly so. And I think it'll change people's outside views, which I think internally we already see. a Tier 1 research university. No question. Downtown campus is expanding nicely, but outside, not as much is known. But I am noticing more and more students from around the world, not just the country, but around the world that are attending at UT San Antonio. So the word's getting out. Yeah. And then we have little gems like Trinity University that do a good job. I think it's incumbent on us to keep those students here. And I think that We almost accept that if they're educated here, like, they're supposed to want to leave. It's kind of like, you know, when I was growing up in the Valley, like, I couldn't wait to get out, and we need to change that dynamic, and we need to make it more interesting and more, you know, attractive for those students to stay in our community. Well, more people need to see the opportunities at Knight Aerospace, so as we're wrapping up here, do you Do you invite field trips for people like journalists, or I'm even wondering, could Geekdom bring a class of future entrepreneurs out there to see the opportunity that's there? I would totally love that. We do tours all the time for different— we just had 30 schoolteachers do an externship this summer that we had at Knight Aerospace for half a day, and so, yes, I'm always welcoming the opportunity for the community. You know, it's a good little story, I say modestly, but it's a great little story. But again, if it opens the eyes of what we can appreciate that we have in our own backyard, I'm totally for it. So I would love to have you come out and see. And right now, we have great products. We have medical modules that are being built. We have rocket cargo containers that are being built. You know, I don't always have a lot of good inventory to show people, but right now, I have a lot of good stuff. Oh, well, thank you. So please do come. And are you involved at all at the Boeing Port Center? Because I've been— there's incredible classes for, you know, computer competitions for students, and that kind of thing that's going on out there. That's really impressive. The partnership with Port San Antonio has been huge for Knight Aerospace. When I first met Jim Perschbach, he was new to his job, and I needed space, but it needed— I needed— I didn't know how much space, so I needed to be in a building that I could contract and expand with, and he did that for me. He took the old Kelly Logistics Center, which is warehousing, and we converted it to manufacturing, and I got the end cap on 36th Street, and now they're building a vertiport across the street from my office. Well, I was gonna ask you about the vertiport. As Jim invites you to take an air taxi, are you gonna climb in? For sure, for sure. You're more of an early adopter than I am. Yeah, well, you know, I say that. I still don't like to fly. But when you're in this space, like, you've got to take some of those things. But, yeah, they've been a great partner. They do a lot of— they've been helping us from a marketing standpoint, from a community standpoint. There's nothing that Jim couldn't ask me to do that I wouldn't be the first ambassador to sign up for because they've been great partners. And we have a great community out there. We have partnerships with a lot of other businesses. You asked about Boeing. Yeah. San Antonio facility is amazing. Over 5,000 employees. They're the C-17 depot for the world. And so, a lot of my customers come to check on their aircraft there, and they come to see us. So, we have a very strong relationship with Boeing. I get a little mad at them sometimes when they pick off my little employees, but we do a lot of stuff together. We're very involved in the community, and where we do see eye to eye is on education and career opportunities. So Boeing, Standard Arrow, you know, we try to hang in there with the big boys and try to do what we can for the community and especially our surrounding community and the educational system. Well, I think you're keeping up with everybody. I appreciate that. Congratulations on all your personal and professional success, and thanks for coming on to Big City Small Town. Thank you so much, Bob, for having me. It was super fun. If you enjoyed the conversation, please do share it with friends and colleagues who might find it interesting. 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