The Story of Aeroflot Flight 593 | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror
"On the 23rd of March, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was en route from Moscow to Hong Kong with 75 people on board..."
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the 23rd of March, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 was en route from Moscow to Hong Kong with 75
00:20people on board. Before it could reach its destination the aircraft appeared to malfunction,
00:27launching into a series of steep climbs and dives, the final one of which took the plane
00:32to an altitude so low that no recovery was possible. The Airbus A310 crashed into the ground
00:40with the loss of every single person on board. A subsequent investigation would reveal that the
00:46crash was due entirely to a sequence of bad decisions, misunderstandings, and errors by the
00:52pilots of Flight 593. In the cockpit of Flight 593 were three men. The captain was 40-year-old
01:03Andrey Viktorovich Danilov, and the first officer was 33-year-old Igor Vassilovich Piskarev.
01:11There was also a backup pilot on board, 39-year-old Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky.
01:18His job was to take the controls when necessary so that the captain and first officer could rest.
01:24It was, after all, a 13-hour flight. Also present was Aeroflot pilot Vladimir Makarov,
01:32who was riding along as a passenger so that he could get to Hong Kong for work.
01:37Several hours after a smooth takeoff Captain Danilov handed over the controls to relief
01:42pilot Kudrinsky and headed back to an empty passenger cabin to rest. He planned to get some
01:49sleep and then return to the controls in time to oversee the landing in Hong Kong. Unfortunately
01:56he would never get the chance. Relief pilot Kudrinsky was an experienced pilot. He had almost
02:049,000 total flight hours and nearly 1,000 hours in the Airbus A310. He had been flying for Aeroflot
02:12for two years without incident... a clean record that makes what he did next all the more
02:18inexplicable. On board the flight as passengers were Kudrinsky's son Eldar and daughter Yana,
02:2516 years old and 12 years old respectively. It was quite normal at the time to invite children
02:32on board the flight up to the cockpit to take a look at the controls. Kudrinsky, evidently keen
02:38to impress his offspring, went one step further. He invited his children to take turns sitting in
02:44his seat and manipulating the actual controls. Yana went first. Kudrinsky hopped out of his seat
02:52and adjusted it for her. The aircraft was being flown by the autopilot at this point,
02:58and as Yana played with the steering column Kudrinsky made a small adjustment to the autopilot
03:03heading so that his daughter would think that she was actually steering the plane.
03:08It's worth noting that he did all of this without officially handing over to his co-pilot.
03:14Even though he was out of his seat he remained the pilot in charge for all intents and purposes.
03:22If the other men present felt that this was a problem they certainly didn't say so.
03:27First Officer Piskarev was sitting back in his seat responding to radio communications.
03:33Makarov, the pilot riding along as a passenger,
03:36bantered with Kudrinsky and offered to take a picture of his kids at the controls.
03:41The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial as Yana left the pilot's seat and Eldar took over.
03:48Once again Kudrinsky invited his child to play with the controls while subtly manipulating the
03:54autopilot heading so that Eldar would feel as though he was actually controlling the plane.
04:00This is where things went terribly wrong. Yana was extremely gentle with the controls
04:06during her turn in the pilot's chair. Eldar was not. He exerted a continuous force on the control
04:14column for more than 30 seconds, something which by design caused the autopilot to partially switch
04:22itself off. A warning light came on to indicate that this had happened, but nobody present
04:28noticed it. Now, as Eldar continued to push the control column very slightly to one side,
04:36the plane began to bank in that direction. At around 8 55pm Eldar asked his father why the
04:44plane was banking to one side. The conversation that followed, as captured by the cockpit voice
04:50recorder, was relatively calm at first. Kudrinsky admitted that he didn't know why the plane was
04:57turning. Makarov suggested that they had entered a holding pattern, and Piskarev agreed. Just a few
05:04seconds later, however, the angle at which the plane was banking became severe and panic erupted
05:10in the cockpit. None of the pilots understood what was happening. Kudrinsky was out of his seat,
05:17and the sudden increase in g-forces caused by the banking of the plane pinned him to the back wall
05:23of the cockpit and made it impossible for him to return to his place. Piskarev, similarly slammed
05:30back in his seat by g-forces, could get only one hand onto the controls. Both men resorted to
05:39shouting instructions to Eldar who, being 16 years old and completely without flight training,
05:46was not in a position to follow them. The sharp angle at which the plane was banking caused it
05:52to lose altitude. The autopilot, which now had only partial control, tried to fix the problem by
05:59pitching the nose upwards and cranking up the thrust... but this just caused the plane to stall.
06:07Unable to do anything further the autopilot disengaged completely. Another automatic
06:12system then kicked in to try and save the plane from stalling. It did this by sending the plane
06:18into a nosedive. In the cockpit there was chaos. Screaming, shouting, panicked suggestions from all
06:26of the pilots. Kudrinsky managed to claw his way back to his seat despite massive g-forces and took
06:33control once more. Between them he and Piskarev wrestled the plane from the nosedive, only to
06:39overcompensate and send it into such a sharp climb that it stalled once more and began to corkscrew
06:46back towards the ground. So hectic was the scene that there was no time even for the pilots to make
06:53a distress call. Their panic and confusion was clearly evident in the cockpit voice recording.
07:16For two minutes they fought for control of the plane, baffled and terrified,
07:30their voices almost obscured by multiple overlapping emergency alarms. By the time
07:36they finally did manage to pull out of the last dive and level out they'd lost a huge amount of
07:43altitude. The final words captured by the cockpit voice recorder came from Kudrinsky.
07:50We'll get out of this, he said. Everything's fine. Gently. Pull up. Gently.
07:58Moments later the plane crashed into the side of a Russian mountain range,
08:03killing every single person on board.
08:06In the aftermath of the accident an investigation was launched. The findings were fairly unilateral.
08:14The crash had been caused, primarily, by the decision to allow children to play with the
08:20controls of the plane. Some design features of the Airbus A310 were also criticized. For example,
08:28the lack of an audible alarm to indicate that the autopilot had disengaged.
08:32It was also realized that more training was required for pilots to help them deal with
08:37autopilot-related issues, something that was addressed through changes in procedure by
08:42airlines around the world. Despite this, the majority of the blame ultimately lay with the
08:49pilots. It served as a harsh lesson in the seriousness of a captain's responsibility.
08:55If any airline pilot didn't already know that it was a bad idea to allow children to play with the
09:00controls of a passenger plane, the ultimate fate of Flight 593 made this very, very clear.
09:09A final sad coda to the story emerged after some analysis. Had the pilots simply let go of the
09:16controls and done nothing when the problem first occurred, the only thing that would have happened
09:21the controls and done nothing when the problem first occurred, the autopilot and other automated
09:27systems would have leveled out the plane and Flight 593 would not have crashed. The final few
09:34minutes of confusion, panic, and desperate attempts to fix a situation of their own making ultimately
09:40doomed the flight. Now, in a post-911 world, most airlines enforce sterile cockpit procedures.
09:50The days when children might be invited to the front of the plane,
09:54even to simply observe the controls, are long since over. It has to be hoped that,
10:00knowing the story of Flight 593, no pilot would ever again try to impress his family by breaching
10:08these rules.