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D
aniela (Sifuentes) Makowski’s favorite task at work is clambering atop the Boeing 234 Chinook – a helicopter that stretches 98 feet from nose to tail, the size of a blue whale. We’re not talking into the Chinook, but on top of it. Today was a good day; she had to go up twice. Really? Twice? “I was looking at the tunnel cover over the shaft that transmits the power from the transmission box to the forward rotor head. I had to see how it works,” Makowski says with a shrug and a smile, holding up a technical drawing of the Chinook and pointing to a part that is, sure enough, smack in the middle of the top of the fuselage. Makowski, 22, is a newly minted graduate of George Fox University’s engineering program. When she arrives at her job at Columbia Helicopters every morning, she parks in the back so she can enter through the hangar and greet these flying machines, rather than come through the front door and navigate the boring office space on the way to her cubicle. Any excuse is a good excuse for Makowski to crawl on something that defies gravity.
If you mess up, people die
“I was probably around 8 when I decided I wanted to be in aerospace. Anything that has to do with flying things, moving things – it’s just really cool.”
Slender and petite, Makowski may look like a high school sophomore, but she talks the talk of an aeronautical engineer – and her job is to take the Boeing helicopter model 107-II (the civilian version of the Sea Knight CH-46) and the Boeing model 234 (the civilian version of the Chinook CH-47) and make them better, lighter, more efficient, stronger. These choppers move massive amounts of equipment, fight fires, work in logging operations and facilitate petroleum exploration around the world. Makowski toys with parts that keep the machines in the air and the people in them alive. Less than a year removed from her graduation in the spring of 2012, Makowski is tasked with designing improvements, repair solutions and type-design changes that maximize the helicopters’ efficiencies and capabilities. Currently, she is updating the Federal Aviation Administration certification for the GE engines on the 107-II and designing a different structural configuration for an overhaul on another helicopter. Does her job make her even the least bit nervous? Another shrug and smile. “When you work here, you have to take a class that basically says if you mess up, people die,” she says. “But it’s not that different from Xerox. If I mess up on a part for a copy machine, it can catch on fire and then the building may burn, killing people.” She had that choice, between Xerox and Columbia Helicopters. But her story begins in another country, half a lifetime ago. “It’s a miracle that I’m here,” she says, with a college degree,
GEORGE FOX JOURNAL
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