Chilling final words of pilot who let his children fly plane before it crashed and killed everyone onboard
Here are the haunting final words of a pilot who made the fatal decision to allow his children to sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly the plane.
On 23 March, 1994 one of the most tragic, and arguably avoidable, crashes happened which caused the deaths of all 75 people onboard.
Aeroflot Flight 593 was heading from Moscow to Hong Kong on a late night flight. Onboard was captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, an experienced pilot who'd clocked around 9,500 hours of flight experience alongside first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov and relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky.
While the three pilots were more than experienced to handle the controls of a commercial jet, none of the men could account for human error caused by children sitting at the plane's controls.
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The flight was first international trip for Kudrinsky's kids Yana, 13, and Eldar, 15, with the pilot wanting to mark the children's first trip by allowing them into the cockpit to see where their father worked.
Despite being against regulations, the crew onboard believed it would be safe as the plane was on autopilot, which meant the children wouldn't actually be in control of aircraft.
First into her father's seat was Yana, who sat down in-front of the controls as around 00:43am and pretended to 'fly' the plane while it was on autopilot.
Kudrinsky's son was next into the chair and was allowed to move the controls and pretend to fly the plane at around 00:51am.
Disaster would strike just under four minutes later.
At 00:54am, the teenager manipulated the control stick for over 30 seconds with inputs up to 10 kilograms, which contradicted the input made by the autopilot to keep the aircraft stable and straight, which then changed the flight control settings to manual.
A slight indicator light flashed up to inform the crew that Eldar was now in partial control of the plane, however the crew weren't used to non-soviet aircraft and failed to notice the warning.
The aircraft then entered a bank, with the autopilot unable to maintain altitude due to the angle of the wings.
Captain Kudrinsky then ordered the co-pilot to take control as he got his son away from his seat so he could take command of the aircraft.
"Eldar, get away. Go to the back, go to the back Eldar! You see the danger don't you," Kudrinsky could be heard saying on cockpit voice recording.
"Go away, go away Eldar! Go away, go away. I tell you to go away!"
The pilots then attempted to regain control of the aircraft and were nearly successful in doing so, however they accidentally over corrected and sent the plane into an almost vertical climb, stalling and sending it into a spin.
It began to lose altitude, and eventually descended beneath the minimum safe altitude for the flight at the section of its route over mountainous terrain.
At 00:59, air traffic control in nearby Novokuznetsk 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.
It turns out that at 00:58, just two minutes and six seconds after the events unfolded, 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 aircraft was destroyed, killing everyone onboard.
Aeroflot initially attempted to deny the pilots were at fault, however the above transcript would ultimately be published, confirming the crash was human error.
Topics: World News, History
Brenna Cooper