Ali Condon
While it might have been the norm to visit the pilots in the plane's cockpit back in the day, it's not as common these days - and this 1994 flight from Moscow to Hong Kong is just one reason why.
This horrifying black box recording captures the moment when relief pilot Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kurrinsky invited his children Eldar and Yana into the cockpit to have a go at the aircraft's controls. The results were disastrous:
Russian airline Aeroflot had been carrying 63 passengers, nine flight attendants, and three pilots from Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, to Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong on Flight 593 in March 1994.
Advert
On board the flight were sixteen-year-old Eldar and 12-year-old Yana, who came into the cockpit to visit their dad Yaroslav.
While they were in the cockpit, Yaroslav decided to let his children have a try of the aircraft's controls.
In a voice recording from their interaction, Yaroslav's daughter Yana can be heard complaining to her dad, before he tells her: "Don't run there, or they'll fire us."
The autopilot was engaged when Yana played with the aircraft controls, meaning she had no real control of the plane.
Then, when her older brother Eldar took his turn, he pushed the controls with enough force to switch off the autopilot for about 30 seconds. This was enough to accidentally put the 16-year-old in partial control of the plane.
Eventually, it was Eldar who noticed that something had gone wrong, when the plane started to veer right, exiting the flight path.
It took the three pilots just a few seconds to figure out what had happened, but in that time, the aircraft swerved at almost a 90-degree angle - a move that the Airbus A310 aircraft can't handle.
The plane started to descent rapidly, before stalling and automatically switching into a dive to recover itself.
Eventually, the pilots managed to regain control and pull the plane out of a dive, but misjudged the force, causing the aircraft to stall again.
"Go to the back! Go to the back, Eldar!" Yaroslav can be heard yelling as the pilots lose control.
"You see the danger, don't you?"
As all three pilots try desperately to adjust the mistake and get the aircraft back on track, Yaroslav tells his kids: "Get out now! All is normal."
That's when the recording suddenly cuts out.
The pilots had managed to recover the spinning aircraft, but by that point, it had lost too much altitude and crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range, killing everyone onboard.
After the crash, investigations found no evidence of technical failure, and that the crash was most likely caused by the children being allowed to take control of the flight.
Perhaps the saddest discovery made was that if the three pilots onboard had left the recovery up to the autopilot, rather than attempting to fix the problem manually, the issue would have resolved itself and all passengers would have survived.