Aeroflot Flight 593 crash. Child in the pilots`cabin
On March 23, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was en route from Moscow to Hong Kong with 75 passengers on board. Before it could reach its destination, the plane made a series of steep ascents and dives — the last of which brought the plane to such a low altitude that recovery was impossible. The Airbus A310 crashed into the ground, killing all the people on board. A subsequent investigation revealed that the crash was solely due to a series of incorrect decisions, misunderstandings and mistakes by the pilots of flight 593.
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There were three people in the cabin of flight 593: the captain-40-year-old Andrey Viktorovich Danilov and the first assistant-33-year-old Igor Vasilyevich Piskarev. On board was a backup pilot-39-year-old Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky. Also present was Aeroflot pilot Vladimir Makarov, who was traveling as a passenger to get to work in Hong Kong. A few hours after the smooth takeoff, Captain Danilov handed over control to the replacement pilot Kudrinsky. He planned to sleep and then return to the helm to make a landing in Hong Kong. Kudrinsky was an experienced pilot: he had almost 9,000 flight hours, and almost 1,000 hours in an Airbus A310. He worked at Aeroflot for two years without incident.
On board the flight as passengers were Kudrinsky’s son Eldar and daughter Yana, 15 and 12 years old, respectively. At that time, it was quite normal to invite children on board the plane and in the cockpit to watch the control of the aircraft. Kudrinsky, clearly keen to impress his children, went even further: he invited his children to take turns sitting in his seat and “control” the plane. Yana went first. Kudrinsky got up from his seat and adjusted it to fit her. The plane was being controlled by the autopilot at that moment, and while Yana was playing with the steering wheel, Kudrinsky adjusted the autopilot’s course a little so that his daughter would think that she was really controlling the plane. It is worth noting that he did all this without officially handing over control to his co-pilot. If the other people present thought it was a problem, they didn’t talk about it. Piskarev talked on the radio, and Makarov (the pilot who was traveling as a passenger) joked with Kudrinsky and offered to take pictures of his children at the controls.
The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly as Yana left the pilot’s seat and the Eldar took it. Kudrinsky again invited his child to play with the steering wheel, subtly controlling the autopilot’s course so that Eldar would feel like he was actually flying the plane. Yana was extremely careful with the controls while in the pilot’s seat. Eldar-no. He continuously pulled the steering wheel for more than 30 seconds, which (in accordance with the design of the system) partially disabled the autopilot. A warning light came on, indicating this, but no one present noticed.
Now, as the Eldar continued to move the wheel slightly to one side, the plane began to list. The Eldar asked his father why the plane had banked. The conversation that followed, recorded by the flight data recorder, was relatively calm at first. Kudrinsky admitted that he did not know why the plane tilted. Within seconds, the angle at which the plane banked became dangerous, and the cabin began to panic. None of the pilots understood what was happening. The sudden increase in gravity caused by the roll of the plane pinned Kudrinsky to the back of the cabin and made it impossible to return to his seat. Piskarev, similarly pinned to the back of the chair by gravity, could only reach the levers with one hand. Both men began shouting instructions to Eldar, who, being a 15-year-old teenager and having absolutely no flight training, was not able to follow them.
The sharp angle at which the plane banked caused it to lose altitude. The autopilot, which now had only partial control, tried to fix the problem by lifting the nose up and increasing the thrust, but this did not help, and the autopilot shut down completely. Then another automatic system was activated to save the plane. She did this by sending the plane into a dive.
The cockpit was in chaos: shouts, commands from all the pilots. Kudrinsky managed to return to his seat and took control again. Together, he and Piskarev brought the plane out of the dive, but sent it into a too sharp climb. The situation was so hectic that the pilots didn’t even have time to issue a distress call. For two minutes they struggled for control of the plane, confused and terrified, their voices barely audible over the many overlapping alarms. By the time they finally managed to get out of the last dive and level off, they had lost a lot of altitude. Moments later, the plane crashed into the side of a mountain range, killing everyone on board.
An investigation has been launched into the accident. The conclusions were unequivocal: the crash was caused primarily by the decision to let children play with the controls of the plane. Some design features of the Airbus A310 were also criticized. For example, the absence of an audible alarm indicating that the autopilot has switched off. This was a harsh lesson about the seriousness and responsibility of being an airplane captain. If any airline pilot didn’t already know it was a bad idea to let children play with the controls of a passenger plane, the fate of Flight 593 made that very clear. After some analysis, the last sad final part of the story emerged: if the pilots had just let go of the steering wheel and done nothing when the problem first occurred, the autopilot and other automated systems would have leveled the plane, and Flight 593 would not have crashed. The last few minutes of confusion, panic, and desperate attempts to fix the situation on their own finally doomed the flight.
After September 11, most of the world’s airlines introduced strict rules for being in the cockpit. The days when children were invited to the front of the plane, even just to watch the controls, are long gone. With modern safety standards, such a disaster is unlikely to happen again.
