30 years ago on March 23,1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 crashed, killing all 75 passengers on board while on its way to Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong because the relief captain let his children into the cockpit and they took over the steering of the plane.
The main pilot of the plane was Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, with Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov as first officer and Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky as relief captain. There were 12 flight crew members on board and 63 passengers.
In news reports, the plane took off from the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Russia peacefully before Captain Kudrinsky invited his two children, who were reportedly on their first international trip onto the flight deck to see where their father worked during the flight.
When the children got into the cockpit, the plane was flying on autopilot so Kudrinsky let his 15-year-old son take control of the plane, thinking since it was on autopilot, there will not be any problems. Unfortunately and out of curiosity, the boy manipulated the control stick for over 30 seconds with inputs up to 10 kilograms.
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This action contradicted the input made by the autopilot in order to keep the aircraft stable and straight. Due to this, the flight’s control settings were changed from auto to manual and surprisingly, none of the pilots noticed the boy was actually the one manually controlling the plane.
By the time the autopilot tried to regain control, it “conflicted with the boy’s controls, which had increased to inputs of 12 and 13 kilograms.” This reportedly, “led to the disconnection of the autopilot servo from the aileron control linkage.”
When the pilots realised what was happening, Captain Kudrinsky ordered the co-pilot to take control of the plane and moved his son away from the control stick. Unfortunately, by the time he got into position to take command of the plane, “the bank angle had increased to 90 degrees, with the A310 unable to turn from such a steep angle.”
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Reports revealed the “plane began to lose altitude, and eventually met down beneath the minimum safe altitude for the flight at the section of its route over mountainous terrain. A nearby air traffic control said they were waiting for,” a position update through radio transmission from the flight, but it never came, as the flight stopped appearing on their radar screens.”
At 00:58, Aeroflot Flight 593 “crashed in a flat altitude at high vertical speed, estimated to be around 160mph, in the Kuznetsk Alatau Mountain range in the Kemerovo Oblast region of southern Russia.” The entire aircraft was destroyed, killing all 75 passengers onboard.
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