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Customer Spotlight
Citation Pilot Has Life
of Adventure
Currently it is investing out of a $600 million fund formed in 2008. That keeps its founder and managing partner,
Alan Frazier, and the company’s Cessna Citation XL on the road a lot. Based at Clay Lacy Aviation on Boeing Field
in Seattle, the Citation is in the air about 450 hours a year.
Key to Success
“It’s a very integral part of our business,” Ross says. “We’ll fly to St. Paul, have a meeting, then we’ll go on to New
York for a meeting; two or three meetings in one day that would be impossible on the airlines. Then it’s home the
next day for the family.”
With offices in Seattle, Palo Alto, and San Francisco the company frequently goes to
Toronto, Baltimore, Boston, Indianapolis, Teterboro, Albany, Nashville, Louisville, and Kansas City. “We’re in Las
Vegas, Los Angeles, Burbank, every big city,” he adds.
Ross’ love for fishing is satisfied by living in Port Townsend, on the shores of scenic Puget Sound. His favorite
place to fish is La Push, surrounded by the lush forest of the Olympic Peninsula at the mouth of the picturesque
Quillayute River. La Push is famous for its fine ocean fishing.
“I was out tuna fishing last week and I got the first albacore of the year. We were the first boats out; went out
40 miles and picked a beautiful albacore,” Ross says. “We got five 30-pounders. That was just for a few hours’
fishing – it was great. Then yesterday I was out salmon fishing for kings and silvers. I really just fish and work.”
Frazier Ventures moved up from using a fractional aircraft provider about five years ago when it brought Ross
to Seattle to establish a flight department. The 8,000-plus-hour pilot was located in the Persian Gulf, where he
was flying VIP charters in a Citation XL for BEXAIR from Bahrain International Airport. It was in the Middle East
during 2004 when Ross flew the Minister of Tourism for Egypt from Dubai to several smoldering locations where
terrorists’ bombings had occurred, setting his Citation down in many of the international hot spots at the time.
Volcano Flying
Earlier in his flying career, for the U.S. Forest Service, Ross flew a Cherokee outfitted with a gas sniffer over
Mount St. Helens, which eventually erupted in devastating fashion in May of 1980. Ross learned to fly during the
early 1970s in a Cessna 150 after mustering out of the Navy, where he served on the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft
carrier maintaining inertial navigation systems and instrumentation on Airborne Early Warning E-2 Hawkeyes.
At one point in his flying career he also piloted Cessna 207s and Twin Otters, literally “flying wild” in Alaska,
complete with sandbar landings.
His first experience with the Cessna Citation Service Center in Sacramento, which Frazier Ventures relies on for
all non-minor maintenance, came much earlier when he flew a Citation 500 for a NASCAR race driver who was
active in the 1980s.
PLEASE SEE NEXT PAGE
For someone who flew to Middle East hot spots
from Bahrain, sniffer flights over a roiling Mount
St. Helens, and survived life or death adventures
on the high seas, 61-year-old Citation Pilot Bill
Ross’ favorite leisure time activity is calm by com-
parison – fishing.
Today he heads the flight department for Frazier
Healthcare Ventures, one of the nation’s leading
providers of venture and growth equity capital to
emerging healthcare companies. Since its incep-
tion in 1991, the company has raised seven invest-
ment funds with total commitments of more than
$1.8 billion.