On Aeroflot Flight 593, it was a pilot’s decision to allow his children to fly the plane that led to the death of everyone on board
There has been a spate of plane crashes making headlines recently.
Earlier this year a London bound Air India plane crashed shortly after take-off in the city of Ahmedabad on June 12, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and 19 others on the ground.
Few in history have been as preventable as one crash that occurred 31 years ago.
Investigators were left speechless when they listened back to the cockpit voice recording, detailing the final moments of Aeroflot Flight 593.
On March 23, 1994, the flight was on route from Moscow to Hong Kong. At the helm were captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov, and relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky.
Just before 1am, Kudrinsky invited his children into the cockpit on their first international flight, so they could see their proud father at work.
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Despite it being against the rules, Yana, 13, and Eldar, 15, were taken into the cockpit to ‘fly’ the plane, under the assumption that it would be safe as the aircraft was on auto-pilot.
However, things rapidly spiralled out of control, culminating in the tragic loss of 63 passengers and 12 crew members.
So what happened?
With the autopilot active, Kudrinsky, against strict protocol, let the children sit at the controls. First, his daughter Yana took the pilot’s left front seat. Kudrinsky adjusted the autopilot’s heading to give her the impression that she was turning the plane, though she actually had no control of the aircraft.
Unlike his sister, Eldar applied enough force to the control column to contradict the autopilot which was keeping the plane stable – for 30 seconds.
He managed to disengage the auto-pilot to manual, meaning he was in control of the plane.
On the cockpit voice recording, which was recovered after the crash, investigators could hear Eldar was the first to notice something was wrong as the plane began to veer to the right.
But, by that point, the aircraft had already swerved at an almost 90-degree angle.
Since the turn was continuous, the resulting predicted flight path drawn on screen was a 180-degree turn. This is similar to those shown when a plane is in a holding pattern waiting to land. But the flight was nowhere near its destination.
The three pilots wrestled with the controls and managed to pull the plane out of the dive but misjudged the force and it stalled once more.
Mr Kudrinsky could be heard saying, “Go to the back! Go to the back, Eldar!” before he shouted: “You see the danger, don’t you?”
He then tried to reassure the children by downplaying the danger telling them: “Get out now! All is normal.”
The cockpit voice recording then cut as the plane ploughed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range at around 160mph.
Aircraft wreckage was discovered on the remote mountainside some 13 miles (20km) southeast of the town of Mezhdurechensk. Rescuers trekked to the crash site, which consisted of smouldering aircraft wreckage and human remains burnt beyond recognition.
In September 1994, a Moscow-based newspaper published a leaked copy of the cockpit voice recording transcript confirming children were in the cockpit.
In April 1995 the formal report of the loss of Flight 593 was published. It concluded that the crash was caused by a stall, spin, and impact with high ground resulting from factors that all tragically arose after an unqualified person – in this case a child – was allowed to sit in the captain’s seat. The pilots’ misguided actions to save the plane led to the stall and spin and effectively doomed it.
Cockpit access rules were tightened in the years following the loss of Flight 593, they were tightened further following 9/11.
A Russian lawsuit against Aeroflot resulted in the company paying damages to relatives.