Aeroflot Flight 593: When a Father's Pride Killed 75 People

The cockpit voice recorder captured the last words clearly: "Eldar, come out! Get out, Eldar! Come out! Full gas!" By the time those words were spoken, the Airbus A310 was already in an unrecoverable dive toward the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range in Siberia. There was nothing left to do.

What led to that moment began more than sixteen minutes earlier, when a father decided to give his children a memory they would never forget.

A Father, Two Children, and Five People in a Cockpit

Captain Yaroslav Kudrinsky was taking his two children on their first international flight. His son Eldar was 15. His daughter Yana was 13. The flight was Aeroflot 593, bound from Moscow to Hong Kong, carrying 63 passengers and a crew of 12.

Somewhere over Siberia, with the autopilot engaged and cruise altitude holding steady, Kudrinsky brought his children into the cockpit. Five people were now on the flight deck: Kudrinsky, co-pilot Piskaryov, Eldar, Yana, and another pilot named Vladimir Makarov who was traveling as a passenger.

Against regulations, Kudrinsky allowed each of his children to sit in the captain's seat and hold the controls. The autopilot was active. He believed the plane would simply fly itself. Yana took her turn first. Then Eldar sat down.

The Detail Nobody Understood in Time

What Kudrinsky did not know — and what Airbus had never mentioned during the pilots' transition training onto the A310 — was that the aircraft's autopilot could partially disconnect. It was not a full shutdown. It was selective. When Eldar applied enough pressure to the yoke, the autopilot quietly released control of the ailerons, the surfaces that control the roll and bank of the aircraft, while continuing to manage other functions. No alarm sounded. No warning light was noticed. The plane began to roll slowly to the right.

Eldar noticed it first. He told his father the plane seemed to be turning on its own. The crew looked at the instruments and could not immediately explain what they were seeing. Those nine seconds of confusion were enough. The A310 banked past 45 degrees, then continued rolling toward 90 degrees, a bank angle steeper than the aircraft's design could sustain at altitude. At that angle, the plane could no longer maintain altitude and began to descend rapidly.

Here is the detail that changes everything about how this crash is remembered: if anyone in that cockpit had simply let go of the yoke at the moment the first spin began, aerodynamic principles would have returned the plane to level flight on their own. The aircraft was built to self-correct. The tragedy was not that no one could save it. The tragedy was that the pilots, not understanding what was happening, kept holding on and kept trying to counter the roll manually — which made the situation worse instead of better. The plane that could have saved itself was prevented from doing so by the people trying to save it.

Sixteen Minutes

From the moment Eldar first sat in the captain's seat to the moment the aircraft hit the mountains, sixteen minutes passed. The A310 struck the Kuznetsk Alatau range and all 75 people on board were killed. There were no survivors.

In the aftermath, Aeroflot denied that children had ever been present in the cockpit. That denial held until a Moscow-based magazine published a full transcript of the cockpit voice recording. The recording made the sequence of events undeniable, and Aeroflot was forced to acknowledge what had happened.

What the Investigation Found

Investigators identified several contributing factors: the decision to allow children into the cockpit and to let them handle the controls, the crew's failure to notice the autopilot warning indicator, their uncoordinated response once the aircraft began to roll, and their general unpreparedness for the situation they suddenly faced.

Investigators also directed criticism at Airbus. The transition training provided to pilots moving onto the A310 made no mention of the fact that the autopilot could partially disengage. The pilots flying that aircraft had never been told that holding the yoke with enough force could silently hand them control of the ailerons while leaving the rest of the autopilot system active. That gap in training did not cause the events that put Eldar in the seat, but it directly shaped why no one in that cockpit understood what they were looking at when the plane began to roll.

At the crash site, families of Russian victims left flowers. Families of Chinese and Taiwanese victims scattered pieces of paper with messages written on them across the mountainside. The mountain did not distinguish between them.