A Bizarre Decision by The Pilot Ended Everyone’s Life
Pilot’s seemingly benign decision proved too costly later
I am a fan of the air crash investigation shows. I have watched countless episodes of the show, but nothing comes close to the Aeroflot 593 crash. The Aeroflot 593 crash (March 23, 1994) befuddles me because I still can’t get my head around how can a well-trained, skilled pilot acts as reckless as the pilots of Aeroflot 593. I thought that pilots understand that they are not just flying an aeroplane, but also responsible for passengers lives who are travelling in the aeroplane. Further, pilots keep in mind that if their aeroplane crashes, the crash, as far as possible, must cause zero ground causalities.
Kids in the cockpit
Aeroflot flight 593 was a flight from Moscow to Hong Kong. It was a night flight and everything was going smooth; 4 and half hours into the flight, the aeroplane was flying over Siberia. A knock on the door interrupts the cockpit calmness. The flight engineer opens the door and finds the pilot’s friend and children. The pilot welcomes them and what the pilot does next is surreal: He allows his daughter to sit in his seat. After sitting in the captain’s seat for few minutes, the daughter handed over the controls to her brother.
The man who was in charge of the aeroplane was a pilot first and then a father. How can he forget that other passengers were in the aircraft?
The brother held the control column firmly and tried to move the control column left and right. But the pilot, father, was sure that those maneuverers will not affect the aircraft’s flying ability, so the pilot and first officer ignored the kid’s fiddling the control column. The pilots thought that the auto-pilot had everything under control.
Autopilot disconnects
But after a while, the aeroplane started rolling right. Roll is aircraft sideways movement-left or right. Different controls of the aeroplane control different movements of the aircraft. An aircraft moves along three axes. You can refer to this article for understanding how aircraft moves. The pilot’s son, who was at the controls, noticed the aircraft’s right roll, which the pilots must have noticed. And even after the aircraft began behaving abnormally, the pilot never asked his son to get off that cockpit seat.
Once the aircraft reached an extreme angle and was diving, negative G force started affecting the aircraft’s occupants. The occupants felt weightlessness, and the weightlessness prevented the pilot from exchanging seats with his son, the son was at the pilot’s seat. But the first officer levelled off the aircraft; the aircraft came out of the extreme angle and its dive.
Recovery and Crash
The first officer, however, in his attempt to recover the aircraft from dive, pulled up the control column more than was required. The over pulling caused the aircraft to enter a stall and again dive, but the pilots, once again, were able to recover the aircraft from the dive. Although the second recovery was successful, the pilots had failed to monitor the aircraft’s height. The aircraft had gone beyond a safe flying height for the terrain it was flying over. The aircraft crashed into a mountain in Siberia.
Kids triggered chain of events
While at controls, the son had unknowingly disengaged the autopilot though it was a partial disengagement. The part of the Autopilot that controlled the aircraft’s roll-left or right movement- had disengaged. No warning appeared when the autopilot was partially disengaged. Since the autopilot was no longer controlling the aircraft’s right or left roll, the aircraft had begun to roll towards the right.
And that roll triggered a chain of events that led to the crash. One plausible explanation for what the pilot did is humans don’t believe something can go wrong until they experience the event first-hand. In hindsight, the captain would regret his decision of allowing the kids in the cockpit.
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