Page 6 - August 2015 Volume 9, Number 8

His day job is as a founding partner with First Trust Portfolios, a financial services firm he helped start in the Chicago area in 1991. His second job is owner of King Air Academy, a training facility in Phoenix that he started in 2013 with Tom Clements and Kevin Carson.
“I was 60 when I started King Air Academy and people were asking, ‘why are you doing that?’ Because I love aviation, I love flying and it’s been such a part of all aspects of my life,” McAlister said. “I’m also a salesman and a business guy, and I like the idea of building a legacy business.”
Through the years, McAlister had reasons to never learn to fly (he was making $24,000 a year with a young family when he started flying lessons) or to quit (he had a heart attack at 55).
“My life is not airplanes, airplanes have been a part of my life that has made it magnificent though,” McAlister said. “The airplane keeps me focused to eat right, to exercise and do the things I need to do to pass my nuclear stress test every year. I consider myself one of the most fortunate guys in the world, I say that with humility and gratitude.”
A lifetime of airplanes
“I was 18 years old when I got engaged, and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I told the girl I got
Ron McAlister, left, and Kevin Carson in the cockpit of McAlister’s 1984 King Air B200. McAlister founded the King Air Academy and Carson runs the academy’s day-to-day operations.
engaged to, ‘Someday I’m going to learn to fly. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but if you have a problem with that, tell me now.’”
She didn’t have a problem with it, and a year later Ron married Donna. They finished college together, and the flying came nearly a decade later after they had started a family.
“I was 26 years old and had a six-month old son; the guy I went to work for had a little Cessna 172. I told him that I’d learn to fly but only when I could afford to buy an airplane. I was working for him for about six months and he came up to me and said, ‘Are you serious about learning to fly?’ He sold me the little 172 and he told me he wouldn’t touch my base salary but I paid a percentage of all the commissions I made until I paid off the plane. I started taking flying lessons every Saturday morning and it took me a year to get my license.”
McAlister, who has an MBA from Illinois State University, began his career as an IBM computer salesman, quickly learning that large companies and computers didn’t light his fire. “Then I got hired by a little bond firm and it became very successful,” McAlister said. “I was an institutional bond salesman there, so I sold fixed income securities to mutual funds and insurance companies and people like that.”
He mostly flew recreationally and not very often, until he traded up to a Beech Sierra. “It was kind of a baby Bonanza, and I got my complex rating, my instrument rating,” McAlister said. “I was a young guy with four kids, so I’d wedge a little time out here and there. Then I got to where I would incorporate the plane in my job by flying to customers. I’d fly out and play golf with them, fly up and play racquetball – in Minneapolis, Des Moines, Cincinnati and New York. But I still wasn’t flying a whole lot.”
Free medical flights for kids with cancer.
Can you help us fly more children in more states?
Hope Flight Foundation is
looking for a donated
King Air 200 or larger, in
airworthy condition. We
currently use a borrowed
Cessna 182, and fly in CA,
OR, and NV. The King Air will
allow us to help more children
in more states, and provide a
stretcher and pressurized cabin. The donor will receive a tax deduction if desired.
Please call our president, Douglas Harding, at (510) 427-3956.
www.HopeFlightFoundation.org

4 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2015