Lisa Atherton tears up thinking about her customers. There is one little girl she will remember forever. Chemotherapy had stripped her youthful hair away. She wore a bandana to cover her scalp. Her father would bring her in every Wednesday after her cancer treatments. In between those visits were the teenagers in search of a sugar rush and lovebirds on a date night. These were the people Atherton scooped ice cream for just 18 years ago in Williamsburg, Virginia, at a Cold Stone Creamery she and her husband, Jim, owned and operated.
So, in 2024, as she sits in a corner office overlooking the expansive headquarters of Bell in Fort Worth, which houses 5,000 of its 8,350 global employees, Atherton is still in awe of how she made it to that seat. “I didn’t have aspirations, nor did I ever believe I’d be a CEO,” she admits. And the odds were stacked against her. According to the International Aviation Women’s Association, women make up just 3 percent of the industry’s C-suite.
But by no means was Atherton plucked from obscurity to run one of the world’s largest manufacturers of helicopters amidst a pioneering $100 billion project for the U.S. military. Her stint as an ice cream franchisee was a side gig after earning an MBA from The College of William & Mary in 2004.
“I made it.”
On a summer evening in the mid-2000s, Atherton and her husband were out for a walk and came across a Cold Stone with a line of customers wrapped out the door and around the block. “We had FOMO and jumped in line,” she says. “We later did some research and decided to take my MBA out for a test drive.”
Jim, who was recently retired after serving for 25 years in the U.S. Air Force, managed the day-to-day operations of the franchise. Atherton, who was doing business development for a weapons program at Textron Systems—the defense, homeland security, and aerospace division of the grander $13.7 billion Textron Inc.—worked on the ice cream business after hours, often staying up until 3 a.m. doing the books and making sure the store was stocked with everything it needed.
All the while, the couple—who had been married for seven years with three children, all of whom were brought into the marriage by Jim—were trying to have a child of their own. But the doctors told the couple they had a six-in-one million chance at naturally conceiving a child. “We shelved that dream and threw all our energy and efforts into Cold Stone,” she says. “But one day, I wasn’t feeling great, and it turns out I was pregnant. So, in the truest of senses, it was a miracle.”
In 2008, amidst trying to open two other Cold Stone Creamery stores, the couple decided instead to sell off their ice cream interests. The entrepreneurial lifestyle just wasn’t conducive to raising a newborn. “I didn’t make any money in the venture,” Atherton says with a laugh. “In fact, I think I might’ve lost a little. But if you ever need good marriage counseling, go into business with your spouse. You really learn to communicate well, problem-solve, and figure out how to do things from different perspectives together.”
Following the sale, Atherton sped up in her career ascension while Jim settled into being a stay-at-home dad. In short order, she moved from being a manager at Textron to vice president of business development. In 2011, she was named VP of area attack systems for Textron Systems, which put her in charge of foreign military sales in multiple countries. As fast as she was rising, she still had no designs on the C-suite. “My dream job was to be the V-22 program manager,” she says. (The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor is a $70 million-per-unit military aircraft with a fleet of more than 450.) In 2013, Bell, a Textron subsidiary, offered her that exact position. “In my mind, I made it,” she says.
“A tap on the shoulder”
Atherton’s meandering career path began at an early age. Both of her parents were educators. Growing up in central Florida, she had no familial influence pushing her to enlist in the military. She only ended up at the Air Force Academy because of a torn ACL. A high school basketball standout, she tore the ligament in her knee her senior year, and the academy was the only institution willing to honor its scholarship offer. “I needed the rigor,” Atherton says. “I thought if I went to a normal college, I would probably be on the five-year plan instead of the four.”
Her knee issues persisted, and her college basketball career ended after a second ACL tear during her freshman year in Colorado Springs. So, she threw herself into her studies and responsibilities as a cadet. Among other things, she spent a year on a special assignment developing a curriculum for sexual assault awareness in the military. “I have a strong sense of justice,” she says. “My Myers-Briggs type is an ESTJ [Extroverted-Sensing-Thinking-Judging].” After graduating, Atherton began her service to the United States in the contracts officer role.
Fast forward to 2017, after the ice cream business and the climb to the V-22 position at Bell, it was a literal “tap on the shoulder,” she says, that catapulted her forward. Ellen Lord, then president and CEO of Textron Systems, was set to leave the company to join the U.S. Department of Defense. After a regular, everyday company meeting, the CEO of parent company Textron, Scott Donnelly, pulled Atherton aside. “I want you to come in and take over [for Ellen],” he told her. “Isn’t that a stretch role assignment for me?” she asked. “I don’t see it that way,” Donnelly concluded.
Leading Textron Systems essentially consisted of managing seven small businesses at once, ranging from piston engine manufacturing in Pennsylvania and its ship-to-shore hovercraft division in Louisiana to microelectronics in Maryland and F1 fighter training in Texas. “Having to work on all that in one day was wild, complex, and yielded the most career growth for me,” Atherton says.
After more than five-and-a-half years at the helm of Textron Systems, she moved back to Bell as chief operations officer. Four months into that post, she was named Bell’s president and CEO. “I’ve known Lisa for 12 years, and I think I wagered a couple of times along the way that she would one day be the CEO of Bell,” says Jeff Schloesser, who runs eight different departments at Bell as the executive vice president of strategic pursuits.
With 13,000 Bell helicopters in circulation, the company has more than Airbus (12,000), a global corporation that generated $72 billion in revenue in 2023.
“Lisa is a culture carrier, so I’m not surprised at all to see her rise in the ranks,” says Ken Hersh, executive director of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which named Atherton one of 60 Presidential Leadership Scholars in 2017. “The leadership qualities necessary to manage a big workforce begin and end with a cohesive culture. Lisa eats, drinks, and sleeps that stuff.”
“The weight of responsibility”
Last year, Bell notched $3.15 billion in global revenue. The company is on pace to hit $3.5 billion in 2024. But Bell is amidst one of the most important contracts in the 90-year-old company’s history—and one of the most important U.S. military contracts right now—that could skyrocket production. “What we do right now will dictate how successful we are for the next 20 to 25 years,” says Atherton, who recently launched a strategic planning process focused on what Bell will look like in 2035.
The U.S. Army has tasked the Fort Worth company with pioneering the future of assault helicopters. Back in 2012, Schloesser—a retired two-star general and the first director of the War on Terror planning office within the Department of Defense following 9/11—was asked by Bell to help design a new helicopter. Dubbed the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the company is developing a helicopter to replace the Black Hawk, an aircraft the U.S. Army has more than 2,000 of, but that has sparked a plethora of safety critiques. Over the past decade, Army data examined by Military.com reveals that, during training alone, 60 fatalities have occurred due to Black Hawk crashes.
“Conflict has changed dramatically,” says Schloesser, whose office is closest to Atherton. “When I was in Afghanistan and Iraq, we needed more speed and a lot more range. Flying the Black Hawk, we had to establish outposts along the flight to refuel. This upgrade is long overdue.”
The U.S. Army is expected to invest between $70 billion and $100 billion over the next 50 years in the FLRAA production. Bell is tracking toward launching the Black Hawk replacement, the V-280, in the early 2030s. “This aircraft will fly twice as far and twice as fast as a regular helicopter,” she says. “When we have threat scenarios in the Indo-Pacific region, you do not always have the benefit of having a base where you could have a bunch of helicopters staged. So, having a platform that can allow you to have a ‘standoff’—the ability to reach the action and reach the fight with top range and speed—is paramount.”
The helicopter will eventually be used by all U.S. armed forces, including the Space Force. The weight of the project is not lost on Atherton. She knows what she and her team do behind the scenes every day—and how Bell’s engineers and developers execute—could be a life-or-death difference for a civilian following a domestic accident or a soldier after becoming wounded on the battlefield. “Do not for a second mistake it when you see me smiling in this job every day,” Atherton says with intensity. “The weight of responsibility I carry is a lot. I have many sleepless nights thinking about all our priorities.
“It’s not just me who understands this,” she continues. “It’s all 8,350 employees at Bell who have to crush this project. The future depends on us. Our warfighters depend on us. The next generation of oil and gas exploration depends on us. The next generation of search and rescue depends on us.”
In The Works: Bell’s First Autonomous Aircraft
The military has been flying autonomous planes for decades in isolated airspace. But a commercial passenger flight has yet to take off without a pilot in the flight deck. Earlier this year, Bell revealed a helicopter based on its 429 model that is designed to be an autonomous flight demonstrator. Dubbed the Aircraft Laboratory for Future Autonomy, at this stage, the company is just using the new helicopter as a test unit for what is called fly-by-wire. “We’re writing software flight control laws that can be applied to any helicopter,” says Atherton. “The thing with autonomy in a vertical platform, if you were to have human beings flying in it, you must get that right. There are so many dynamic components at play when you’re trying to beat gravity into submission. So, at this stage of autonomy, you’re always going to want to have a backup safety pilot. But the technology is progressing, and
we’re trying to push into it at Bell.”
“Bring it on.”
Bell’s big contract win was met with outrage by those who opposed it. For Atherton, the decision was straightforward: it came down to the simple doctrine of quality. “The business principles are the same, whether you’re selling waffle cones or helicopters,” she says.
The Army’s decision to choose Bell’s design, an aircraft that can hover like a helicopter and fly like a fixed-wing plane, befuddled lawmakers in Connecticut and decision-makers at Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky, which is based in Stratford. After all, Sikorsky, which bid on the contract, produced the Black Hawk helicopter. Why wouldn’t it get a chance at replacing its own product?
In a 38-page document made public by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Army declared FLRAA renderings from Sikorsky and its partner on the project, Boeing, as “unacceptable” for engineering, design development, and architecture. Despite Bell’s projected cost of nearly $8.1 billion and Sikorsky/Boeing’s just $4.445 billion, the discount was not enough for the Army to choose what it deemed an inferior product. (Sikorsky and Boeing have built 90 percent of the U.S. Army’s current military rotorcraft, which have racked up more than 15 million flight hours.) Bell’s architecture, engineering, and design development were noted as “acceptable.” The Source Selection Advisory Council found that Bell’s design was “the most advantageous solution and best value to the government.”
“They did protest, but I think the technology inside [Sikorsky’s] aircraft was not going to be appropriate on the battlefield,” Schloesser says.
Sikorsky and Boeing reportedly considered suing the U.S. Army for its decision to award the contract to Bell. Ultimately, neither company pursued legal action. Not only did Sikorsky lose out on the project that could have 11 zeroes attached, but it also lost out in the near term on a $50 million incentive package the state of Connecticut committed had it won the business.
“We have a DNA about us that screams, ‘Bring it on,’” Atherton says. “Our aircraft is a leap in technology, a leap in warfighting capability, a safer aircraft that can keep the military out of harm’s way because it is faster. And because of its speed, it can also get soldiers to medical aid much faster.”
As a veteran of the Air Force, for Atherton, that’s what it’s all about—taking care of her brothers and sisters in arms. “My hope is that 20 years from now, no one remembers Lisa Atherton,” she says. “I want them to remember that the decisions I made in 2024 and 2025 were the right ones that set them up for success long into the future.”
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