Night flight Moscow-Hong Kong
Airbus A310-308 took off from Sheremetyevo Airport at 20:39 on 22 March 1994. Flight SU593 from Moscow to Hong Kong was operated by a wide-body aircraft produced only three years ago, carrying 12 crew and 63 passengers, most of whom were Russian citizens. The plane took off without any problems and reached an altitude of 10,100 meters.
At 00:56 on March 23, four hours after takeoff, the plane began to lose altitude sharply and soon disappeared from radar screens. It quickly became clear that it had crashed near the city of Mezhdurechensk in the Kemerovo region.
No one could understand what had happened: before September 11, 2001, no terrorist attack was expected, there were no air defense exercises at the crash site, the aircraft had literally just come off the production line and was flown by an experienced crew. Various hypotheses have been put forward: for example, the aircraft may have flown into a weather balloon, causing extensive damage and disabling the crew and major systems on board.
Only a few weeks later, when rescue teams discovered the black boxes and experts deciphered them, the true cause of the disaster was revealed. He was great.
History of a plane crash
As it turns out, The flight went smoothly until midnight.. The aircraft was flown by a spare PIC (aircraft commander)Yaroslav Kudrinsky, 39, has more than 8,940 flight hours, 907 of which are in the Airbus A310. The commander himself, 40-year-old Andrei Danilov with 9,675 flight hours (950 on the A310), was resting in the passenger cabin. In the cockpit was 33-year-old co-pilot Igor Piskarev, who had 5,885 flight hours (440 hours in the A310).
Approximately At 00:40, according to the sounds, Danilov and Kudrinsky’s children entered the cabin13-year-old Yana and 15-year-old Eldar are also on board. Three minutes later, the backup PIC evacuated the workplace but did not transfer control to the co-pilot, relying entirely on the autopilot. After that, Kudrinsky’s children began to sit in the commander’s chair one by one. This was a gross violation of several flight rule points simultaneously, but then it got worse.
“So Yana, will you be a pilot? “Hold the helm, hold on” aforementioned daughter reserve PIC at 00:47. It was a reckless but not suicidal move: the pilot knew that slight manipulations of the control wheel should not disable the autopilot. Over the next few minutes, Kudrinsky showed his daughter how to fly the plane: for example, he “taxied” a few degrees left and right using the autopilot’s heading adjuster.
At 00:51, the girl got out of the pilot’s seat and was replaced by 15-year-old Eldar. His father also started showing him how the routefinder worked, but At 00:54 the young man asked for permission to “turn the steering wheel”. Kudrinsky agreed and began to give instructions: “Then be careful where you turn. Let’s go left, let’s turn left!”
The pilot is likely to call the attitude indicator displayed on the windshield “earth” – a straight line that always extends along the horizon and is necessary to control the aircraft’s position. But it’s not entirely clear how the 15-year-old will track him down and what he’ll do with this information.
Eldar began to slightly deflect the steering wheel to the left, the plane began to roll, and the autopilot tried to correct this. Kudrinsky began manipulating the course setter to help complete the maneuver. The boy and the autopilot struggled with each other for about a minute, throwing the plane in different directions. They were also helped by the co-pilot, who apparently tried to avoid too sudden a movement of the rudder and “insure” the Eldar. At one point, the chaotic movements created a total pressure of 11-13 kg on the steering wheel; autopilot automatically disconnected from roll control.
Meanwhile, the reserve commander did not monitor his son’s actions because he was distracted by the conversation with his daughter. As a result, the plane under the control of the child began to slowly lurch to the right. When the aircraft pitched 45° within 20 seconds, the autopilot could no longer maintain the designated flight altitude and the aircraft began to descend.
Eldar noticed the problem before his father did: “It’s incomprehensible. Why freezes? He replied with surprise: “Is it spinning on its own?” As a result, the pilots concluded that the autopilot began to perform one of the planned maneuvers. But At 00:55 the plane started shaking and it became clear that the situation was abnormal.. As the bank reached 63°, the co-pilot worked intensively to stabilize the aircraft. Instead of pulling his son out of the chair by the collar and trying to save the ship, Kudrinsky began giving him commands: “Stop it! Take the helm! Hold it! This command meant a call to stabilize the plane, but the boy took it literally and, clinging to the steering wheel with all his might, interfered with the co-pilot’s work.
As a result, the aircraft reached a bank angle of 90° and at the same time the autopilot continued to increase the pitch. (“nose to tail” slope or vice versa) (“pull the steering wheel towards you”). At this point Kudrinsky and Piskarev should have realized to turn off the autopilot and fly the plane manually, but instead they tried to change the entered flight parameters.
For this to succeed, a deep understanding of the nuances and algorithms of the autopilot is required, which is not required during normal operation of the aircraft and which SU593 commanders do not have.
As a result, three forces fought for control: a teenager who did not understand commands and did not know how to fly planes; an autopilot and Piskarev trying to achieve certain parameters in a mode for which it was not designed. He was the only one who understood what was needed for the rescue, but due to his height of 160 centimeters and the fact that the seat was pushed back to the limit, he did not have the strength to cope with the child and the autopilot.
INSIDE 00:56 the autopilot turned off and the pilots managed to save the plane from rolling over and stop.but at the cost of Airbus diving in at a 45° angle. Fearing that the side would stick to the ground, Piskarev took the helm all the way, which created an overload of 4.8 g. This is a lot even for military aircraft (not fighters) and exceeds the permissible standards several times, but the plane survived and did not break up.
At that time, Kudrinsky was trying to get his son out of the chair, but he could not get up because he was crushed due to the excessive load. When he finally succeeded, it appears that the boy touched the pedal with his foot, thereby deflecting the rudder. This caused the plane to start rolling again, make a roll turn and dive vertically downwards – at this moment weightlessness appeared in the cabin. The pilots managed to pull the ship out of the dive at an altitude of several hundred meters, but it was too late. In the darkness, the liner touched the tops of trees on a hill and hit the ground at 00:58.
No one on board survived.
Was the plane destroyed by a child?
The official report on the incident states that the culprit of the accident was the crew who transferred control to unauthorized persons. This is certainly officially the case – but everyone knows that many pilots put children at the controls and this does not lead to disasters. Therefore, Vladimir Kofman, Chairman of the Commission for the Investigation of Air Accidents of the International Aviation Committee, laid the unofficial, “humanitarian” blame on the co-pilot.
“Basically, there’s nothing wrong with a child sitting in the pilot’s seat while the autopilot controls the plane. The question is different: What did the happy father’s partner, who had “technical reserve”, do while taking care of his son?
Instead of monitoring the instruments and immediately taking control if something happened, he went to the corner of the cabin and filmed the Eldar with a video camera. And he missed the moment when the boy took manual control of the Airbus and did not notice the deep roll in which the plane went. “When the pilots realized it was too late” said It is aimed at journalists.
Following the crash, a warning was added to the Airbus A310 operating manual that the autopilot would stop roll control if more than 10 kg of force was applied to the yoke for 30 seconds or more.