On the 23rd of March, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was en route from Moscow to Hong Kong,
with 75 people on board. Before it could reach its destination the aircraft appeared to malfunction,
launching into a series of steep climbs and dives - the final one of which took
the plane to an altitude so low that no recovery was possible. The Airbus A310
crashed into the ground with the loss of every single person on board.
A subsequent investigation would reveal that the crash was due entirely to a sequence of
bad decisions, misunderstandings, and errors by the pilots of Flight 593.
in the cockpit of Flight 593 were three men: the Captain was 40-year-old Andrey Viktorovich Danilov
and the first officer was 33-year-old Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov. There was also a backup
pilot on board: 39-year-old Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky. His job was to take the controls when
necessary so that the captain and first officer could rest - it was, after, all a 13-hour flight.
Also present was Aeroflot pilot Vladimir Makarov, who was riding along as a passenger so that he
could get to Hong Kong for work. Several hours after a smooth takeoff, Captain Danilov handed
over the controls to relief pilot Kudrinsky, and headed back to an empty passenger cabin to rest.
He planned to get some sleep and then return to the controls in time to oversee the landing in
Hong Kong. Unfortunately, he would never get the chance. Relief pilot Kudrinsky was an experienced
pilot: he had almost 9,000 total flight hours, and nearly 1,000 hours in the Airbus A310.
He had been flying for Aeroflot for two years without incident - a clean record that makes what
he did next all the more inexplicable. Onboard the flight as passengers were Kudrinsky's son
Eldar and daughter Yana, 16 years old and 12 years old respectively. It was quite normal at
the time to invite children on board the flight up to the cockpit to take a look at the controls.
Kudrinsky, evidently keen to impress his offspring, went one step further:
he invited his children to take turns sitting in his seat and manipulating the actual controls.
Yana went first. Kudrinsky hopped out of his seat and adjusted it for her.
The aircraft was being flown by the autopilot at this point,
and as Yana played with the steering column Kudrinsky made a small adjustment to the
autopilot heading so that his daughter would think that she was actually steering the plane.
It's worth noting that he did all of this without officially handing over to his co-pilot.
Even though he was out of his seat, he remained the pilot in charge for all intents and purposes.
If the other men present felt that this was a problem they certainly didn't say so. First
Officer Piskaryov was sitting back in his seat, responding to radio communications.
Makarov (the pilot riding along as a passenger) bantered with Kudrinsky
and offered to take a picture of his kids at the controls. The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial
as Yana left the pilot's seat and Eldar took over. Once again Kudrinsky invited his child to play
with the controls while subtly manipulating the autopilot heading so that Eldar would
feel as though he was actually controlling the plane. This is where things went terribly wrong.
Yana was extremely gentle with the controls during her turn in the pilot's chair.
Eldar was not. He exerted a continuous force on the control column for more than 30 seconds,
something which (by design) caused the autopilot to partially switch itself off. A warning light
came on to indicate that this had happened, but nobody present noticed it. Now, as Eldar continued
to push the control column very slightly to one side, the plane began to bank in that direction.
At around 8:55pm eEldar asked his father why the plane was banking to one side.
The conversation that followed, as captured by the cockpit voice recorder,
was relatively calm at first. Kudrinsky admitted that he didn't know why the plane was turning.
Makarov suggested that they had entered a holding pattern, and Piskaryov agreed. Just a few seconds
later, however, the angle at which the plane was banking became severe, and panic erupted in the
cockpit. None of the pilots understood what was happening. Kudrinsky was out of his seat,
and the sudden increase in g-forces caused by the banking of the plane pinned him to the back
wall of the cockpit and made it impossible for him to return to his place. Piskaryov,
similarly slammed back in his seat by g-forces, could get only one hand onto the controls.
Both men resorted to shouting instructions to Eldar, who - being 16 years old and completely
without flight training - was not in a position to follow them. The sharp angle at which the
plane was banking caused it to lose altitude. The autopilot, which now had only partial control,
tried to fix the problem by pitching the nose upwards and cranking up the thrust...
but this just caused the plane to stall. Unable to do anything further, the autopilot disengaged
completely. Another automatic system then kicked in to try and save the plane from stalling.
It did this by sending the plane into a nosedive. In the cockpit there was chaos: screaming,
shouting, panicked suggestions from all of the pilots. Kudrinsky managed to claw his way
back to his seat despite massive g-forces and took control once more. Between them,
he and Piskaryov wrestled the plane from the nosedive, only to overcompensate and send it
into such a sharp climb that it stalled once more and began to corkscrew back towards the ground.
So hectic was the scene that there was no time even for the pilots to make a distress call.
Their panic and confusion was clearly evident in the cockpit voice recording...
[Multiple voices
shouting in Russian]
For two minutes they fought for control of the plane,
baffled and terrified, their voices almost obscured by multiple overlapping emergency alarms.
By the time they finally did manage to pull out of the last dive and level out they'd lost a huge
amount of altitude. The final words captured by the cockpit voice recorder came from Kudrinsky.
"We'll get out of this," he said. "Everything's fine. Gently. Pull up, gently." Moments later, the
plane crashed into the side of a Russian mountain range, killing every single person on board.
In the aftermath of the accident an investigation was launched. Rhe findings were fairly unilateral:
the crash had been caused primarily by the decision to allow children to play with the
controls of the plane. Some design features of the Airbus A310 were also criticized.
For example, the lack of an audible alarm to indicate that the autopilot had disengaged.
It was also realized that more training was required for pilots to help them deal with
autopilot-related issues - something that was addressed through changes in procedure
by airlines around the world. Despite this the majority of the blame ultimately lay
with the pilots it served as a harsh lesson in the seriousness of a Captain's responsibility.
If any airline pilot didn't already know that it was a bad idea to allow children to play with the
controls of a passenger plane, the ultimate fate of Flight 593 made this very, very clear. A final
sad coda to the story emerged after some analysis: had the pilots simply let go of the controls and
done nothing when the problem first occurred, the autopilot and other automated systems would have
leveled out the plane and Flight 593 would not have crashed. The final few minutes of confusion,
panic, and desperate attempts to fix a situation of their own making ultimately doomed the flight.
Now in a post-9/11 world most airlines enforce sterile cockpit procedures. The days when children
might be invited to the front of the plane even to simply observe the controls are long since over.
It has to be hoped that, knowing the story of Flight 593,
no pilot would ever again try to impress his family by breaching these rules.