The date is March 23, 1994. Passengers going from Moscow to Hong Kong boarded the Airbus A310 with the tail number F-OGQS. But the journey gave place to an event they never expected. Moreover, because of a small ‘family visit’.
Flight 593 of Aeroflot airline company ended with the death of 75 people, including 63 passengers and 12 flight crew. The plane crashed into the ‘Kuznetsk Alatau’ mountain range in the Kemerovo Oblast in southern Russia.
So what caused the plane to crash?
- Photograph of the crashed plane taken in 1993.
After the plane crashed, technical examinations showed that there were no problems with the plane’s systems. In fact, the plane itself is not old, it was only put into service in 1992. The truth was revealed by examining the black box.
Among the passengers on the flight were Eldar, the 16-year-old son of reserve pilot Yuroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky, and his 12-year-old daughter Yana. This was quite normal.
Eldar and Yana visited their father in the cockpit of the plane during the flight. In fact, this was normal and legal at that time. But what was not normal was that Yuroslav gave the controls of the plane to his children.
Yes, the controls of the huge 75-seater plane fell into the hands of two children:
Yana was the first to take control of the children who came to visit the cockpit. The 12-year-old girl didn’t put too much pressure on the controls so it didn’t disable the autopilot. The aircraft continued its course under autopilot control.
But the Eldar exaggerated the situation a little. The boy over-loaded the aircraft’s controls, causing the autopilot to fail. The blades of the aircraft were now manually controlled from the control stick. Its speed was still under autopilot control.
The pilots realized the situation late and everything started to happen in a chain:
With the plane controls now in Eldar’s hands, the plane began to lean to the right. The pilots questioned why the route on the screen began to change without noticing the warning lights.
But in the time before the truth was discovered, the Eldar had pulled the control stick of the plane towards him. The nose of the plane had reached a steepness close to 90 degrees, even exceeding 45 degrees, and was looking at the sky.
Naturally, the plane had now largely lost its speed. He began to fall rapidly towards the ground. To get out of the situation, the autopilot increased the power of the engines, began to pull the nose down. The plane is no longer falling, but diving into the ground.
After a while, the controls of the plane were again in the hands of the pilots. But this time, the pilots applied too much force to straighten the nose of the plane and raised the nose of the plane too much, causing it to start falling again.
Although the pilots had corrected these mistakes, it was too late. The plane had reached an altitude of 1,300 feet (about 400 meters), so low that it could no longer be rescued. There was no longer any place to escape and the plane crashed into the mountain slopes.
The plane’s landing gear was off and its engines were at full power. The area where it fell is covered with a 1.5 meter thick layer of snow; It was a wooded area. The impact of the crash destroyed the plane and burned.
- The exact location where the plane crashed, 53°30’00.0″N 88°15’00.0″E
And there was the saddest part:
The data obtained from the plane showed that if the pilots did not make any intervention, the plane could actually recover from this fall on its own. In other words, if the pilots had not touched the controls since the first autopilot maneuver, the aircraft would have completed the rescue maneuver and continued on its route.
Aeroflot denied that there was a child in the cockpit after the crash:
Aeroflot, who used the plane for rent, denied the information that there was a child in the cockpit at first. But he admitted the truth when Moscow-based Obozrevatel magazine shared the recordings inside the cockpit.
Moreover, in-flight cockpit visits were not prohibited even after this accident:
In-flight passengers’ cockpit visits continued until the September 11, 2001 attack. Of course, these visits were at the initiative of the pilots and airlines. But after 9/11 all in-flight visits were banned.
The cockpit visit is currently only possible with the permission of the pilots prior to the flight. In addition, pilots can also accept children in the cockpit while making flight preparations, depending on the rules of airline companies.
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