Aeroflot Flight 593: Ill-fated crash caused by children in cockpit

The aircraft involved in the accident was a leased Airbus A310-304, registered as F-OGQS, serial number 596 and was powered by two General Electric CF6-80C2A2 engines.

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On the 23rd March 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 which was a A310-304 crashed into a hillside of the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range, Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, killing all 63 passengers as well as 12 crew members on board.

The relief pilot Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky's children - his 16-year-old son Eldar and his 12-year-old daughter Yana - were also among the passengers. Having been allowed to do so at that time, the children visited their father in the cockpit early on in the flight.

During the flight, children of the relief pilot visited the cockpit where Yana took the pilot's left front seat. By adjusting the autopilot's heading, Kudrinsky gave her daughter the impression that she was turning the plane, while in reality she had no control over it. The pilot's seat was soon occupied by Eldar Kudrinsky, pilot's son and he was able to contradict the autopilot for 30 seconds unlike her sister after applying enough force to the control column.

Eldar Kudrinsky's control column inputs caused the flight computer to switch the plane's ailerons to manual control while maintaining control over the other flight systems and as a result, the aircraft banked right. As the flight path depiction on the screen changed to show a 180-degree turn, the pilots failed to notice warning lights and became confused. In the time it took for the pilot to notice the problem, the bank angle had steepened to almost 90 degrees.

After this, the aircraft began to stall and automatically entered a dive to recover. Once the pilots regained control, they attempted to pull out of the dive. They were successful, but overcompensated and the aircraft stalled again. The aircraft entered a spin due to its steep angle of attack this time. Although the pilots were able to recover, the aircraft had lost a lot of altitude by the time they had done so. The aircraft crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range in Kemerovo Oblast, killing everyone on board.

The children's actions and distraction in the cockpit contributed to the crash. Permitting them to take control was against the rules. No technical failure was detected. Unfortunately, there is also evidence that if the pilots had left the controls to the autopilot instead of manually adjusting, the situation would have been recovered.

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