The black box captured Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky’s frantic final warning to his son moments before Aeroflot Flight 593 slammed into a Russian mountain range, killing all 75 people on board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSpVJ1VxOKc
Kudrinsky, who was serving as relief captain on the Moscow-to-Hong Kong flight on March 23, 1993, had invited his children into the cockpit while his colleagues rested. His son Eldar, 15, and daughter Yana, 13, were given turns in the pilot’s seat in what the father believed was a harmless experience, since the autopilot remained engaged.
The disaster unfolded when Eldar pushed on the control stick for more than 30 seconds. That duration was long enough to override the autopilot and switch certain functions to manual control, putting the teenager in partial command of the aircraft without anyone realizing it. A warning light did activate, but the pilots failed to notice it.
Eldar quickly lost control, and the plane began to plummet. The cockpit voice recorder preserved Kudrinsky’s desperate reaction as the situation spiraled.
“Eldar, get away! Go to the back, go to the back, Eldar! You see the danger, don’t you?” he shouted. “Go away, go away Eldar! Go away, go away. I tell you to go away!”
Kudrinsky was also heard ordering his children to “get out now” as the pilots scrambled to recover. Their attempts to pull out of the nosedive sent the aircraft climbing almost vertically, stalling it again. The plane spun out of control, and despite further efforts, the crew could not regain sufficient altitude to avoid crashing into the mountains at 160mph.
Captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov and first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov had been the primary flight crew, with Kudrinsky rotating in for relief duties. The cockpit invitation to his children came during this rest period for his colleagues.
Investigators later determined that a critical error compounded the initial mistake: if the pilots had released the controls once the aircraft began spinning, the plane likely would have leveled out on its own and the crash could have been averted.
Aeroflot initially attempted to deny crew responsibility for the disaster. The release of the black box audio exposed the true chain of events and contradicted those claims.
The tragedy became one of the most notorious cases of cockpit incursion in aviation history, demonstrating how quickly automated systems could be disengaged and how catastrophic the consequences of unauthorized personnel at the controls could become.