Aaron Daniels takes flight

In 2011, Rice University mechanical engineering student Aaron Daniels (’13), helped program an AR-Drone. He was interning with Sikorsky Aircraft and the team project was part of a company-wide intern competition. His team placed second, but Daniels’ biggest win was discovering how much he loved merging his engineering studies with flight.

“After that summer, I never looked back,” said Daniels, who now works as a project engineer for Sikorsky’s Black Hawk Modernization program.

Applying what he learned about mechanical engineering to his growing grasp of aircraft made his Rice courses even more interesting. “My favorite classes were Thermodynamics and Advanced Fluid Mechanics with Brent Houchens, who is now working in industry. His last lecture at Rice was given a few weeks before I graduated. Everyone knew it would be his last Rice lecture; but B.C. remained true to form and led that classroom of students through an amazing blend of science, engineering, and real life applications.”

Like his favorite instructor, Daniels is also blending and explaining concepts and engineering for real life applications. His role —as the technical project lead for modernizing specific aspects of the iconic helicopter— requires Daniels to communicate with a variety of engineers and business administrators.

He said, “I am responsible for the program’s overall engineering, cost, and schedule performance, so I’m probably the engineer who interfaces with our customers the most. But I also spend a lot of time communicating with the various Integrated Product Teams that are associated with different parts of the aircraft, functions, and various engineering sciences.

“My primary job is to make sure we are doing what we need to be doing when we need to do it. If I walked around asking, ‘Are you done yet?’ all the time, I’m not doing my job. It is more important for me to remove any roadblocks our teams might encounter.”

Read the rest of his fascinating story in the ACTIVATE Engineering Communication website.