Children took the pilot’s seat, 75 passengers lost their lives – Last Minute World News

AeroflotJust after midnight on March 23, 1994, Flight 593 was preparing to depart from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, the capital of Russia, to Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong.

Flight crew Captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov It consisted of 63 passengers and 12 members under his leadership. Danilov, an experienced pilot with Aeroflot since 1992, had logged more than 9,500 hours of flight time.

First Officer to Himself Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov and Vice Captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky was accompanied. As the plane began its journey smoothly, Captain Kudrinsky’s two children, experiencing their first international flight, visited the flight deck.

While the plane was on autopilot and most of the passengers were asleep, a fatal decision was made.

At 00:43, Kudrinsky’s 13-year-old daughter sat in the captain’s seat and adjusted the direction of the autopilot, imitating the act of flying. After eight minutes, the 15-year-old son was allowed to use the control stick. The young boy disrupted the autopilot’s control by applying forces of up to 10 kilograms for 30 seconds.

This manual intervention caused the autopilot servo to disconnect from the aileron control linkage. The crew, more accustomed to Russian aircraft, missed an important warning because they were not familiar with the Airbus system. Subsequently, the aircraft entered a steep bank and the autopilot had difficulty maintaining altitude.

Captain Kudrinsky took immediate action, directing the co-pilot to man the controls while he led his son away.

However, it was too late to adjust the autopilot settings; The plane had already entered a dangerous 90-degree bank. Pilots attempting to correct the plane’s dive overcompensated, causing a near-vertical climb and stalling the plane, causing it to spin.

Descending rapidly, the aircraft fell below the minimum safe altitude for its mountainous route. At 00:59, while air traffic control in nearby Novokuznetsk was waiting for a location update, Flight 593 disappeared from radar screens.

The aircraft flew over southern Russia at a high vertical speed of approximately 160 mph. Kemerovo Oblast in the region Kuznetsk Alatau Mountain Range’It crashed and everyone on board died.

Although Aeroflot initially denied the pilots were at fault, the leak of a cockpit voice recorder transcript revealed the true course of events.