Aeroflot flight 593
| Aeroflot flight 593 | |
|---|---|
 The crashed Aeroflot Airbus A310 |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | Loss of control when controlled by a child |
| place | 20 km east of Meshdurechensk , Russia |
| date | March 23, 1994 |
| Fatalities | 75 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Airbus A310-304 |
| operator | Aeroflot |
| Mark | F-OGQS |
| Passengers | 63 |
| crew | 12 |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
The Aeroflot Flight 593 was a scheduled flight of Aeroflot between Sheremetyevo International Airport and the Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport . On March 23, 1994, this route was flown by an Airbus A310-304 with the aircraft registration F-OGQS . The machine crashed in a hilly landscape in Siberia near Meshduretschensk , killing all 75 people on board. The recordings on the voice recorder showed that Eldar Kudrinski, the captain's 15-year-old son, was at the wheel at the time of the accident.
After evaluating the flight recorder , the investigators found that the aircraft, which had flown normally up to then, suddenly leaned to the right, then quickly gained altitude and then fell towards the ground. The reason was that the captain's son had unknowingly disabled a function of the A310's autopilot that was unknown even to most pilots at the time.
The course of the accident
The captain, Jaroslaw Kudrinski ( Russian Ярослав Кудринский ) took his two children on their first long-haul flight that day. During the flight he showed them the cockpit and offered them to take the helm while the autopilot was active. First the daughter took a seat in the pilot's seat. Kudrinski changed the course of the autopilot so that the daughter felt as if she was turning a corner even though she was not in control of the plane.
Then he let his son Eldar take the wheel. With him, too, Kudrinski changed the autopilot course so that the A310 flew a curve. After returning to course, Eldar forcefully held the helm in the neutral position. This conflicted with the control commands from the autopilot and after thirty seconds of the son holding the helm the autopilot servo of the roll channel was mechanically disconnected from the control of the ailerons. While the bank and therefore the heading could no longer be controlled by the autopilot, it remained active in all other areas of the control. The fact that the autopilot could be partially deactivated in this way was unknown to the pilots as a special function of the A310 and was not signaled to the pilots clearly enough. This fact as well as the then untrained handling of extreme situations of commercial aircraft were later recognized as the main reasons why the pilots could not counter the oversteering of the aircraft.
Eldar was the first to notice that the aircraft was beginning to lean to the right at 2.5 degrees per second. Shortly thereafter, an unexpected curve in the flight path was shown on the navigation display, which the pilots viewed as an unplanned holding pattern and confused them for a while. In the meantime the inclination had exceeded 45 ° and about +2 g acted on the aircraft. This made it impossible for Kudrinski to remove his son from the wheel. When the bank angle had reached almost 90 ° (forces up to +4.8 g occurred here), the autopilot tried to correct the flight position with its remaining functions by making the aircraft fly almost vertically upwards. In this flight position, however, there was a stall , so that the machine came into a spin.
During the following dive, the forces normalized and Jaroslaw Kudrinski was able to take control again. Although he and his co-pilot regained control of the Airbus, they were no longer able to pull the plane up in time to pull it up before the ground. About three minutes after the autopilot was partially switched off, the machine crashed on the ground.
media
On an episode of the Canadian television program Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit , a reconstruction of the accident was shown in the episode Kind in the Cockpit . Also Michael Crichton's novel Airframe describes a plane crash with a similar course.
Flight number
Many airlines no longer issue flight numbers that have been involved in an accident. However, the Moscow – Hong Kong route was still flown as Flight 593 after the crash of March 23, 1994 and was only replaced by SU212 20 years later in December 2014 with a modified flight plan.
Web links
- Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
- Aeroflot Flight 593 Crash Animation + CVR . youtube.com. Accessed May 17, 2015
Individual evidence
- ^ Report on the investigation into the crash of A310-308, registration F-OGQS, on March 22, 1994 near the city of Mezhdurechensk . Investigation report on behalf of the Air Transport Agency (English translation).