Many people remember when you could visit the cockpit during a flight. This has been banned for many years, and cockpit access is much more secure these days. However, one unfortunate cockpit visit stands out when one of the pilot’s children was allowed to take control – with devasting results.
Aeroflot flight 593
The incident happened onboard an Aeroflot Airbus A310 aircraft on March 23rd 1993. The aircraft carried registration F-OGQS and had only entered service with the airline at the end of 1992.
The A310 was operating Aeroflot Flight 593 from Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, to Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. There were 63 passengers onboard (40 Russian nationals and 23 foreigners), nine flight attendants and three pilots.
The A310 was Airbus’s second aircraft launched. Photo: Airbus
Family visit to the cockpit
Two of the passengers onboard were the children of relief pilot Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky – his sixteen-year-old son Eldar and 12-year-old daughter Yana. During the early stages of the flight, they visited their father in the cockpit – not an unusual situation as that was allowed at the time.
What was unusual was that Yaroslav allowed his children to handle the aircraft’s controls. The autopilot was engaged at the time. The descriptions of what happened next are based on transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder.
His daughter, Yana, took the controls first. Yaroslav adjusted the heading on the autopilot to turn the aircraft while she was at the controls, but the autopilot remained engaged. His son, Eldar, then did the same but applied much more force to the control column. This disengaged autopilot control of the aircraft ailerons, leaving Eldar partially in control.
This caused the aircraft to bank right. The pilots failed to notice warning lights and became confused as the flight path depiction shown on the screen changed to show a 180-degree turn. In the time it took to realize the problem, the aircraft bank angle had steepened past 45 degrees to almost 90 degrees.
Stall then a spin
The Airbus A310, like most commercial aircraft, could not handle such a steep bank angle. The aircraft started to descend rapidly. With the autopilot disengaged from aileron control, it tried to compensate by pitching up and increasing thrust.
The aircraft began to stall and automatically switched into a dive to recover. The pilots then regained control and attempted to pull out of the dive. They succeeded but over-compensated and again stalled the aircraft. This time, the steep angle of attack caused the aircraft to enter a spin. Again, the pilots managed to recover from this, but the aircraft had lost too much altitude. It crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range in Kemerovo Oblast, killing everyone onboard.
Cause of the crash
Obviously, the children’s actions and their distraction in the cockpit were contributing factors. Allowing them to take any form of control was against regulations. There was no evidence of a technical failure of any sort found. Sadly, it was also reported that if the pilots had left the controls to the autopilot, rather than try and correct manually, it would have recovered the situation.
Have you ever visited the cockpit during a flight? Do you remember when this used to be a common experience?
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