A pilot’s decision to let his children sit at the controls of a passenger jet became part of a fatal chain of events aboard Aeroflot Flight 593. The cockpit recording captured his urgent attempts to get his son out of the seat as the crew struggled to regain control.

On 23 March 1994, the Airbus A310 crashed in Siberia during a flight from Moscow to Hong Kong. All 75 people aboard—63 passengers and 12 crew members—were killed.

Relief captain Yaroslav Kudrinsky had invited his daughter, Yana, and teenage son, Eldar, into the cockpit. With the autopilot engaged, he allowed them to take turns occupying the captain’s seat.

During Yana’s turn, Kudrinsky adjusted the autopilot to make it seem as though she was steering the aircraft. Eldar then took the seat, but his interaction with the controls had consequences the crew did not immediately recognize.

Sustained pressure on the control wheel caused the autopilot’s connection to the ailerons—the wing surfaces that control banking—to disengage. The aircraft could now roll in response to manual inputs, even though another part of the autopilot remained active. The investigation identified the absence of a specific warning for this disconnection as one factor in the crew’s failure to understand what was happening.

As the aircraft banked increasingly steeply, the cockpit atmosphere turned from relaxed conversation to alarm. Kudrinsky repeatedly ordered Eldar to move away from the controls while the pilots tried to recover the aircraft.

The aircraft’s extreme attitude and the forces acting on everyone inside complicated their efforts. The developing emergency involved a steep descent, recovery attempts and further loss of control. There was insufficient height to prevent the collision with the terrain.

The investigation revealed a combination of failures: allowing an unauthorized person to occupy the pilot’s seat and manipulate the controls, failing to recognize the change in autopilot operation, and making inappropriate control inputs during the emergency.

Flight 593 remains a devastating example of how a breach of cockpit discipline, compounded by confusion about automation, can escalate into a catastrophe. The recording preserves the crew’s desperate response, but the circumstances leading to those final moments explain how the disaster unfolded.