With a seventeen-year career at Leonardo, Naomi Santiago works at Leonardo Helicopters US, in Pennsylvania. Operational since 1980, it is a center of excellence in the rotary-wing aircraft sector, where the AW139, AW119Kx and AW609 helicopters are produced and assembled. The site is home to one of the thirteen worldwide Leonardo Training Academies, delivering complete training for pilots, flight engineers and maintenance technicians.
Today, Naomi is a Customer Support Manager for Leonardo Helicopters US’s Service Center, one of the over 100 Leonardo centres specialised in service fleet assistance, supporting over 5,000 helicopters, 365 days a year, for more than 1,400 clients worldwide. In this role, she guarantees customers with support services, promoting the company’s training capabilities and ensuring that all supply, maintenance and update requests are met through the helicopter’s entire lifecycle.
Naomi has a wealth of experience in the field, including her service onboard Marines Corps helicopters. A proactive approach, and excellent analytical and communication skills are just some of the abilities that she applies to her daily work, and that are necessary because, as she explains “the greatest challenge is keeping up with the changes”, referring to Leonardo’s technological evolutions.
Among the projects she has worked on is the development of the training programme for the AW609, assembled at the Leonardo Helicopters site in Philadelphia. This is the first civil tiltrotor in the world, a revolutionary aircraft that combines the flexibility of a helicopter with speed, range and altitude of an airplane, and can be used in a wide variety of missions, including Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Search and Rescue (SAR), VIP/Executive and offshore. Naomi’s goal is to design “the best training possible for this new technology, while also meeting the requirements set forth by the authorities.”
She believes that working at Leonardo provides a wealth of opportunities for growth, training and professional development in the vast array of technological sectors in which the company operates. Even if Naomi constantly looks to the future, she sustains that learning from past experiences is key to working with customers and managing technological innovation.