Back in the day, it might have been common to visit the pilots in the plane’s cockpit. These days, however, it’s not as common, and this flight from Moscow to Hong Kong in 1994 is just one example of why.
A horrifying black box recording shows the moment when relief pilot Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky let his children, Eldar and Yana, into the cockpit to try out the controls.
In March 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was going from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow to Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. It had 63 passengers, nine flight attendants, and three pilots.
Eldar, who was 16, and Yana, who was 12, were on the flight. They came into the cockpit to see their dad, Yaroslav.
Yaroslav let his children try out the controls of the plane while they were in the cockpit.
In a voice recording of their conversation, Yaroslav’s daughter Yana can be heard complaining to her dad before he tells her:
Don’t run there, or they’ll fire us.
When Yana played with the plane’s controls, the autopilot was on, so she didn’t really have control of the plane.
Then, when her older brother Eldar had a turn, he pushed the controls hard enough to turn off the autopilot for about 30 seconds. This was enough for the 16-year-old to take over some of the plane’s controls by accident.
Eldar finally realized that something was wrong when the plane began to turn to the right and leave the flight path.
It only took a few seconds for the three pilots to figure out what was wrong, but at that time, the plane turned almost 90 degrees, which is something that an Airbus A310 plane can’t do.
The plane started to fall quickly, but then it stalled and went into an automatic dive to get back up.
The pilots were able to take back control of the plane and pull it out of a dive, but they misjudged the force and caused the plane to stall again.
Go to the back! Go to the back, Eldar!
As the pilots lose control, Yaroslav can be heard screaming.
You see the danger, don’t you?
As the three pilots desperately try to fix the mistake and get the plane back on track, Yaroslav tells his children:
Get out now! All is normal.
At that point, the recording just stops.
The pilots were able to stop the plane from spinning, but by then it had lost too much altitude and crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range, killing everyone on board.
After the crash, investigators found no evidence of a technical problem and concluded that the crash most likely happened because the kids were given control of the plane.
The saddest thing that was found was that if the three pilots on board had just let the autopilot take over instead of trying to fix the problem themselves, the problem would have been fixed and everyone would have lived.
