Jess Battison
No matter how old we get, we’ll always try and have a peep in the plane’s cockpit when we’re boarding.
Gone are the days where it was relatively normal to visit the pilots and that’s not exactly surprising - this 1994 flight from Moscow to Hong Kong is just one of the reasons why.
Relief pilot Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky decided to let his kids, Eldar and Yana, into the cockpit where they tried out the aircraft’s control. As captured in this horrifying black box recording, the results were disastrous:
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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.
On board the flight were 16-year-old Eldar and 12-year-old Yana, who came into the cockpit to visit their dad.
While they were in the cockpit, Yaroslav decided to let his children play with the aircraft's controls.
In a voice recording from their interaction, 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 teen 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 descend 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 the 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 the passengers would have survived.
An Aeroflot spokesperson said at the time it had tightened cockpit discipline following the incident.