The words “Eldar, back off!“ remain among the last recordings in the cockpit of “Aeroflot“ flight 593. They were spoken by reserve captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky after his son took the pilot's seat during a flight from Moscow to Hong Kong. A little later, the plane crashed in a mountainous area, killing all 75 people on board.
The crash occurred on March 23, 1994.
The children in the cockpit
The captain of the flight was Andrey Viktorovich Danilov, and the first officer was Igor Vasilievich Piskarev. Kudrinsky acts as backup captain and invites his children - 15-year-old Eldar and 13-year-old Yana - into the cockpit during the flight.
He allows them to sit in the pilot's seat while the autopilot is on. With Yana, Kudrinsky sets the plane up so that she has the impression that she is making turns herself. When it is Eldar's turn, the boy presses the steering wheel for more than 30 seconds.
This action does not completely turn off the autopilot, but switches part of the control back to manual mode. A warning light signals the change, but the pilots do not notice it in time. The plane begins to bank and rapidly loses altitude.
The Last Seconds
When he realizes what is happening, Kudrinsky starts shouting at his son to get away from the controls. The flight recorder reads:
„Eldar, pull back! Go to the back, go to the back, Eldar! You see the danger, right? Pull back, pull back. I'm telling you to pull back!“The pilots then tried to pull the plane out of the dive. During the maneuver, the plane rose almost vertically, lost speed, and again entered a spiral motion. Subsequent attempts to recover came too late, and the plane hit the mountain range at a speed of about 257 kilometers per hour.
What the investigation found
The investigation concluded that the plane could probably have stabilized if the pilots had released the controls after the spin began. The plane would have gradually come out of the spin, but by then it had already lost too much altitude.
Initially, the airline tried to deny the crew's fault. However, the later publication of the black box recording showed that children were in the cockpit and that one of them had influenced the control of the plane. The case remains one of the most famous examples of the dangers of allowing outsiders to control a passenger plane.
Sources: ladbible.com, latimes.com