The production of aircraft engines places special demands on the worker: focus at each stage of part processing, accuracy, and resistance to distracting factors. It is these qualities that make deaf and hard-of-hearing specialists in demand in the workshops of the United Engine Corporation (UEC, part of the Rostec Group) — today, more than 470 people with hearing impairments work there.
Among them are automatic line adjusters, lathe operators, milling machine operators, assemblers, and specialists of the highest skill levels with decades of experience. Alexander, an adjuster at UEC-UMPO, came to the Ufa enterprise as a grinder 23 years ago, successively mastered four related professions, and now advises colleagues and foremen himself. The experience of some hearing-impaired employees of the corporation exceeds half a century.
Communication within the workshops is provided by full-time sign language interpreters — they accompany the hearing-impaired in production, during training, and qualification exams. In addition to translation, sign language interpreters, together with deaf colleagues, form new gestures for narrow-industry terms that do not yet have a fixed designation in Russian sign language: aircraft engine construction is moving faster than the sign language dictionary can be updated.
Hearing-impaired workers are employed at several UEC sites: in Perm, Samara, Ufa, Naro-Fominsk, and other cities. The corporation cooperates with the All-Russian Society of the Deaf, which is celebrating its centenary this year.
For an industry with a chronic shortage of skilled workers, this is not a social program — it is personnel logic: people who have been honing accuracy for decades in noisy workshops, which they simply do not hear, turn out to be among the most stable carriers of production competencies.
