.jpg)
Niamh Shackleton
A plane carrying 63 passengers and 12 members of staff never made it to its final destination after one of the pilots let his children into the plane's flight deck.
On 23 March, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 left Moscow, Russia, as planned, and was headed for Hong Kong.
The aircraft was being flown by Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, who had a whopping 9,500 hours worth of in-flight experience.
Advert
He was joined by first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov, who also had vast flying experience having racked up nearly 6,000 hours, as well as relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky.
With this in mind, you'd expect the flight to go very smoothly — but it descended into chaos when Kudrinsky let his teenage kids into the cockpit.
It was reportedly his daughter, aged 13, and 15-year-old son's first international trip with their dad.
The timeline of the events that then unfolded went as follows...
Kudrinsky's daughter sat in her father's seat, manually adjusting the autopilot's heading setting so it made her feel like she was 'flying' the plane.
Kudrinsky let his son essentially take control of the plane, possibly believing that because autopilot was controlling the aircraft, and that the 15-year-old's actions would have no effect.
The teenager manipulated the control stick for over 30 seconds with inputs up to 10kg, which contradicted the input made by the autopilot to keep the aircraft stable and straight, and changed the flight control settings to manual.
Advert
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 13kg.
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.
Advert
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.
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.
Advert
The aircraft was destroyed, killing everyone onboard.
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.