Pilot gave children who were flying plane chilling warning before it crashed and killed all onboard
75 lives were lost when the plane crashed into mountains
A pilot who let his children fly the passenger plane he was in charge of had his last words before the aircraft crashed recorded on the black box.
Aeroflot Flight 593 crashed on 23 March 1994, and all 75 people on board were killed after the plane collided with a mountain range in Russia while it was travelling from Moscow to Hong Kong.
The plane was being flown by Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, alongside first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov, but also in the cockpit was relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky.
A relief captain is someone who can step in and take over the job for a while, allowing the other crew members time to rest. They are also able to take over piloting duties should the need arise.
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However, while Kudrinsky was someone the airline trusted to take over flying the plane, his children certainly weren't, and the black box recording indicated that they were in the cockpit before the crash.
When he was at the controls, he'd let his son Eldar, 15, and his daughter Yana, 13, into the cockpit so they could see where he worked and let them sit in the pilot's seat so they thought they were flying the plane.
Kudrinsky thought this was all right since the autopilot function was switched on, and he believed his children could think they were in charge of the plane while there was actually no danger.
He adjusted the autopilot to make Yana think she had turned the plane, and when it was Eldar's turn, he pushed on the control stick for over 30 seconds, long enough to contradict the autopilot and switch certain functions of the aircraft back to manual control.
A warning light came on, but the pilots didn't notice it, and Eldar lost control of the plane, with him stalling the aircraft as attempts from the bits of the autopilot still switched on to get the flight back on track went against his actions.
The black box recording of Kudrinsky showed that he'd shouted: "Eldar, get away. Go to the back, go to the back, Eldar! You see the danger, don't you? Go away, go away Eldar! Go away, go away. I tell you to go away!"
Unfortunately for everybody on board the flight, this warning came far too late.
Kudrinsky was heard telling his children to 'get out now', and after that, the pilots set about attempting to regain control of the plane, but in their attempts to pull out of a nosedive, they had it flying up almost vertically and stalled it again.
The aircraft spun out of control, and despite further attempts to recover the situation, they dropped too low to avoid crashing into the mountain range at a speed of 160mph.
An investigation into the crash found that if the pilots had actually let go of the controls after the aircraft started spinning, they would likely have survived, as it would have levelled out.
The airline initially tried to claim that the crew was not at fault for the crash, but when the black box audio was released, the truth was revealed.
Topics: Russia, World News, Travel
Joe Harker