All 75 passengers killed in horror plane crash after pilot let his children in cockpit to control the plane
Just 30 years ago, one of the most tragic aviation tragedies in history occurred, all because the pilot let his children into the cockpit.
Shortly after midnight on 23 March, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was set to depart Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Russia towards Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong.
On board, there were 63 passengers and 12 flight crew, who were captained by Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, a Russian pilot who had worked for Aeroflot since 1992.
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He was an experienced pilot, with over 9,500 hours of flight time, including 950 hours in the A310 - the same model used for Aeroflot Flight 593.
He was joined by first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov with 5,885 hours of flight time, and relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky with 8,940 hours.
The plane took off with no drama, and began its journey.
Captain Kudrinsky's two children were on their first international trip with their father, and were both invited onto the flight deck to see where he worked during the flight.
The aircraft was flying on autopilot at this time as it cruised towards its final destination, with the majority of its 63 passengers asleep.
At 00:43, Kudrinsky's daughter, 13, sat in her father's seat, manually adjusting the autopilot's heading setting so it made her feel like she was 'flying' the plane.
At 00:51, Kudrinsky let his son, 15 - for reasons unknown - essentially take control of the plane, possibly believing that because autopilot was controlling the aircraft, the 15-year-old's actions would have no effect.
At 00:54, 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.
Nobody onboard realised that he was in control of the aircraft but when autopilot tried to regain control, it conflicted with the boy's controls, which had increased to inputs of 12 and 13 kg.
Eventually, this led to the disconnection of the autopilot servo from the aileron control linkage.
The pilots missed a non-audible warning light, as they had mostly flown Russian-built aircraft and were unfamiliar with the Airbus setup.
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.
After re-adjusting his seat due to auto-pilot settings, the bank angle had increased to 90 degrees, with the A310 unable to turn from such a steep angle.
With the pilots left to fend for themselves, they managed to recover the aircraft's dive, though 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.
Despite Aeroflot initially denying that the pilots were at fault, it was forced to change its account of events when a leaked copy of the cockpit voice recorder transcript was published.
Joshua Nair