An airplane pilot put his kids in charge of flying before it crashed and killed scores of people, and his harrowing last words provide a chilling insight into a completely avoidable disaster.
This horrific incident occurred back in 1994, and hopefully we’ll never see anything like it again.
Final words of Russian pilot who let his kids take the controls
It goes without saying that kids shouldn’t be allowed to take control of an aircraft of any kind, let alone a passenger jet.
However, that’s what this Russian Aeroflot flight team did.
Relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky was flying on-board a plane bound for Hong Kong from Moscow one evening, alongside fellow crew members captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, and officer Igor Vladimirovich Piskaryov.
Before 1:00am on that fateful night, Kudrinsky’s children were invited into the cockpit to see how the plane worked, and where their dad plied his trade.
Credit: Michel Gilliand/Wikimedia Commons
Thirteen-year-old Yana and 15-year-old Eldar were allowed to help ‘fly’ the plane, which they believed was OK because it was on autopilot at the time.
Ultimately that decision led to the death of 63 passengers and 12 crew members.
The recorder captured the moment things went wrong
The incident occurred when Eldar was at the controls, as he accidentally switched from autopilot to manual control.
By the time the pilots realized that the accident had occurred, it was too late.
When the plane started to change course, the kids were ushered away and the three professionals tried to restore order.
But it was too late.
The cockpit recording revealed the last words that the pilots ever said.
Kudrinsky could be heard to say: "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!"
The last recorded words on the transcript - as reported here - are: “We'll get out of this. Everything's fine ... Gently [unintelligible], gently ... Pull up gently!”
The pilots did almost save the situation, but allegedly over-corrected the craft, meaning that it crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range at great speed.
Everyone was killed, and it took only a matter of minutes from the kids entering the flight deck to the crash.
At the start of the investigation into the cause, Aeroflot tried to argue that the crash was not the fault of the pilots - although the later released audio suggests otherwise.
The crash was officially attributed to human error - which seems pretty accurate.