Pilot’s CHILDREN in Control! | Aeroflot Flight 593

an airbus a310 is in a fully developed spin hurdling towards the snowy mountains below there's nothing wrong with the aircraft instead this situation has been caused by a father's pride in his work and a little-known function of the autopilot stay tuned a huge thank you to blinkist for sponsoring this video the accident that i will tell you about today is among the saddest and most preventable ones that i've ever come across and it serves as a really good reminder that even though you might break rules with the absolute best intentions it can still start a chain of events that you cannot control in the evening of the 22nd of march 1994 an airbus a310 from russian airlines which is a subsidiary to the russian flag carrier aeroflot is getting ready for a flight between moscow and hong kong the flight time is expected to be 13 hours and 39 minutes which is so long that you require at least three pilots to fly it so that they can alternate and take some rests during the flight the piloting command is a quite experienced 40 year old and he has been flying the airbus a310 for about two years at this point giving him about 950 hours on type his previous experience was largely on the tupolev 134. together with him is a fairly experienced 33 year old first officer who joined the air flot about two years prior and has amassed 440 hours of flying on the airbus a310 and the third pilot is an experienced 39 year old captain who has amassed 907 hours on the airbus a310 and on this flight he is traveling for the first time ever internationally together with his two teenage children jana and eldar and that fact is going to become very important for what's about to happen the rest of the crew consists of nine cabin crew members and there are 63 passengers a lot of them actually airline employees who are traveling over to hong kong on this flight the pilot goes through the pre-flight they check the weather the weather is fine on route it's not expected to be any turbulence or anything like that and they'll start making their way down towards the aircraft when they get down to the aircraft they're met by another pilot who's going to be traveling as a passenger and he asks if it would be possible for him to sit inside of the cockpit during the flight and this is agreed by the pilot the crew starts preparing for departure the pilots are looking through the technical logbook which they see is completely clean there's no technical issues with the aircraft so they continue with their preflight preparation they board the passengers they push back from the gate starts taxiing out and at time 1339 utc that's 20 39 local time they take off from on my two five right in shadimyatova airport in moscow initially they make a right hand turn up towards the northeast and they climb to 30 000 feet where they stay for about 27 minutes before they continue to climb up to their initial cruise altitude of 34 000 feet the flight proceeds normally for the first four hours over the dark skies of central russia and at 26 minutes past midnight it's time for the piloting command to get back to get his rest so he leaves the cockpit gets into the passenger cabin and sits down to get a few hours of sleep and the co-captain takes his place in the cockpit so now the co-captain which i'm going to refer to as the captain from this point onwards is pilot flying and he's sitting together with his first officer who's pilot monitoring who's handling the radio and it's around this time that the captain decides that he's going to invite his two teenage children into the cockpit he's really proud of his work and he wants to show off this highly technological cockpit to his children which i completely understand remember this is prior to 9 11. so the rules around who could come in and visit the cockpit was not as stringent as they are now so there's nothing strange with this request and the children comes into the cockpit and starts looking curiously around at 43 minutes past midnight the captain suddenly has an idea he asks his daughter jana if she would like to sit in the pilot chair and fly the aircraft jana gets excited over this idea and the captain now leaves his chair he does not hand over controls to the first officer instead he puts himself behind the center pedestal still technically in charge of the aircraft and the pilot flying roll jana gets into the seats she sits down and she looks up on this massive control wheel ahead of her and she also asks her dad if he can put the seat up a little bit so she gets up a little bit higher now i mentioned to you before that letting the children into the cockpit was not strictly against the rules at the time but this what is happening right now this is against the rules because as the piloting command and pilot flying you're not really supposed to leave the pilot share for any reason other than strictly safety related or operational and if you do you have to hand over the controls to the pilot monitoring who then becomes pilot flying but this doesn't happen instead he gets out of the chair and he lets in an outsider someone with no training whatsoever into the pilot chair and this is probably the worst break of the rules of them all because under no circumstances are you allowed to neither then nor now to have someone like that sitting in the active pilot chair in an aircraft that is in flight the first officer is watching this happening and since he is pilot monitoring he has pulled his chair to the furthest back position he is only 160 centimeters long so with the chair in that position he doesn't properly reach the pedals and it would be problematic to try to hand fly from that position and this is soon going to have some severe consequences the captain now tells his daughter jana to put her hands on the control wheel that she's gonna get to fly the aircraft he then reaches up and he switches the autopilot mode from navigation which is the mode that follows the pre-programmed route to heading which is going to follow whatever he sets on the heading bug he moves the heading bog more than 15 degrees to the left and this initiates a 20 degree bank turn to the left and since jana has her hands on the controls it will feel like she is the one that is actually making the turn once the turn has been initiated and been going for a while the captain then reaches over and brings the heading book back again which initiates a right-hand turn and once they're back onto more or less their initial track he re-engages navigation and the aircraft continues on its route during this whole maneuver jana has only rested her hands on the controls she hasn't applied any force to it so this means that as the autopilot was doing this left and then right maneuver it hasn't felt like the pilots were trying to counteract it in any way jana stays in the pilot seats for about seven minutes curiously looking around until at times zero zero five two she makes way for her older brother eldar who's now keen to get into the pilot seat and try it out for himself as the siblings are now changing place in the left-hand seat the first officer gets onto the radio and he calls up novosibir's control he gives them a position report and he tells them that they will reach the waypoint sakir at time 059 about 8 minutes away turns out that they will never make this waypoint and i'll tell you all about what happens next after this short message from my sponsor now i don't know about you guys but i personally love reading books and listening to podcasts it gives me new ideas and new perspectives that i didn't even knew existed the problem though is that i always seem to lack time to do it so that's why i'm so happy to have blinkist as the sponsor of this episode because blinkist was created exactly for that purpose what they do is they take their more than 5 000 titles in 27 different categories and they distill them down to the most essential core bits that they call blinks this means that you can listen to a book or a podcast in only 15 to 25 minutes which is perfect when you're on the commute to work for example if you think that that sounds really interesting well then go down click on the link here below which is blinkist.commentorpilot it will give you a seven day free trial so you can check it out and if you decide to subscribe it will give you a 25 discount on the premium subscription so go down and check it out when the son eldar who is 16 years old at the time sits down into the captain chair the pilot who's been traveling passively on the jump seat asks if he can take a picture of him and elder of course agrees and he's really proud of this moment which we all can understand the captain now intends to do exactly the same type of maneuver with elder as he did with his daughter jana earlier but before he can start the maneuver eldar turns over and asks his father if he can actually turn the yoke the captain responds with yeah you can and then he reaches over and he engages heading again he turns the heading bog once again more than 15 degrees to the left which initiates the turn by the autopilot but this time eldar is actually inputting with quite a bit of force onto the control wheel this can be seen later on the flight data recorder by some asymmetry between the left and right aileron as he's doing so but initially this doesn't really impact the autopilot once he has initiated the turn and done the left-hand turn for a while the captain once again reaches over to the heading bog and moves it over to the right to re-initiate a right-hand turn lr follows through in the controls and he inputs a little bit more pressure onto the steering wheel now as the autopilot is starting to get closer to its intended heading it also starts to input in order to level off the wings to maintain the heading that is indicated by the heading bug the problem now is that elder keeps his pressure onto the yoke keeps it wanting to turn right and this exceeds a limit value inside of the autopilot and here's where you need to understand a little bit about how the autopilot works so when we use the autopilot in most of these more advanced modes the autopilot has full authority to both turn the aircraft and maintain altitude or climb or descend right it controls the aircraft in all three axes a pilot would never try to counteract the autopilot when it's moving unless there is a non-normal situation so if the autopilot for whatever reason is not doing what it's supposed to then the pilots can intervene and the way that the autopilot is supposed to respond to this is by giving authority back to the pilots and it can do so in different ways depending on the aircraft type in most cases this causes the autopilot to disconnect completely and that is abundantly obvious to everyone because it will come with an oral warning that it happened and you will also see it on your flight mode enunciator but here is where a key detail of the autopilot on the airbus a310 differs from the types that these pilots have been flying before because as eldar is now maintaining his right hand turn input on the steering wheel and the autopilot tries to level off it feels that okay the pilot wants me to do something else and it disconnects only the lateral channel of the autopilot this means that the autopilot is still engaged it doesn't give any oral warnings it doesn't even give any visceral warnings to the pilots that this has happened it still controls the aircraft's altitude but it has now relinquished control in the lateral part the turning part of the autopilot this decoupling of the lateral autopilot channel would for a trained pilot definitely be felt if you are turning against the autopilot and this decoupling happens you would feel suddenly a difference in the amount of force feedback you need to put into the controls but because elder is now doing this input and he has no idea about what he's doing he has no training or no knowledge of this he doesn't notice it and there's also a possibility that the first officer at this point is also following through on the control wheel on his side but he wouldn't notice it either because he might think that the difference in force feedback is due to inputs that eldar is doing on his side so none of the two people that are at the controls and certainly not the pilot the only real pilot that has input to the controls now notices that this decoupling happens the aircraft now continues its right-hand turn past the point where it should have leveled off and followed its original route and it's slowly increasing its bank angle because there is still a little bit of force introduced on the steering wheel towards the right there's still no indication in the cockpit that the lateral channel of the autopilot has been disengaged but it's also fact that none of the pilot seems to be monitoring the aircraft as it continues to turn during this time the captain has actually looked away a little bit and he's engaged in a conversation with his daughter jana and that takes about 20 seconds or so and it's when the aircraft bank angle increases past 20 degrees of bank that the 16 year old eldar speaks up and he says why is it turning and the first officer looks over at him in response is it turning by itself and ella responds to it yeah at this point the pilot on the jump seat speaks up and he says it's turning into the area guys and the first officer looks down onto his navigation display and he says yeah it's it's reaching the area the holding area a holding area is an oval shaped area that aircraft goes into when they need to hold for whatever reason for example before they can start an approach into an airport or if they have to hold at a certain navaid for another reason but why would the pilots think that they're entering a holding area they haven't told the aircraft to do so they haven't programmed it and it's definitely not on the route well it turns out that in flight testing on the airbus a310 when it's subject to a situation like this when the aircraft is turning away from its intended route and it doesn't follow the autopilot it can start to show a false track line on the navigation display this is basically a suggested track line so the aircraft's saying well you're turning obviously so maybe you want to go this way and it can turn out either as a straight line or as a circular line but in any case if the pilots are looking down on the navigation display and they suddenly see that the aircraft is or looks like it's following this suggested track line maybe that's why they think that this is happening in any case it seems like all of the pilots are now looking at this happening on navigation display and none of them is monitoring what's actually happening to the aircraft's attitude because like i was saying before the aircraft is now banking more and more to the right it passes 30 degrees which is the limit for the autopilot it passes 45 degrees which is what we considered a steep turn and it continues to increase and interestingly enough this also happens without any oral warning inside of the cockpit but remember how i said that the autopilot has not disengaged fully that it's still trying to maintain the altitude well because the only way that it can do that is by increasing the elevator back pressure and also changing the angle of the stabilizer it's now trying to do that but as the aircraft banks more and more it becomes more and more hard for the autopilot to keep the altitude so as the aircraft passes about 45 degrees of bank angle it also starts descending but because the elevator is now deflected upwards in order to try to maintain the altitude the aircraft as it's banking more and more is also subjecting the passengers and crews to more and more g-forces so when it passes about 45 degrees of bank the g-force is about 1.6 so 60 more than normal and this is likely what finally gets the pilots to look down onto their primary flight display to see what's going on the first one that speaks up is the jump seat pilot who says hey guys that's quickly followed by the captain who said hold it hold the control column hold it it is very likely that that command from his father the captain actually caused eldar to physically hold on to the control column that would be the logical response for someone who is not a trained pilot what the captain actually wanted was for the pilots to level the aircraft off to hold the bank angle and to try to bring it back onto the left this was correctly understood by the first officer who is now trying to put left input onto the aileron in order to level the aircraft out again but because elder is now following his father's direct order the captain's order to hold the flight controls the first officer as he's inputting left aileron encounters resistance and because this is happening only a few of the flight controls like the aileron on the right hand side and a few of the flight spoilers on the left-hand wing is actually following this input this is happening because of another feature of the flight control system on the airbus you see if the yoke the steering wheel of an aircraft would become blocked on one side for whatever reason it's really important that the remaining pilot with the remaining steering wheel will still be able to control the aircraft and the way that you do this is that you apply force to the control input until you physically separate the two from each other but when that happens the remaining pilot will only be able to control parts of the flight controls on the wings this is likely what's happening here and as the first officer is now trying to turn towards the left and the eldar is holding on to the flight controls as his father has told him to do it becomes really really hard and sluggish for the first officer to try to straighten the aircraft up and you can see on the flight data recorder that he actually momentarily reverses as in turns right for a bit just to kind of see whether or not something is wrong with the flight controls but when he does so the bank angle just increases even more towards the right now it is unlikely that this actually made much difference in this case because as the aircraft is now at an almost 90 degree bank angle and the elevator which remember the autopilot is still trying to maintain the altitude is deflected almost fully upwards it means that the angle of attack of the aircraft has exceeded the stall angle and when the wings are stalled you might not have any air on control anyway interesting to note here is that for the first few seconds of this stall event there is no audible stall warning in the cockpit they definitely have buffeting you know the aircraft will be shaking which is a very clear signal that they're in a stall but since the autopilot is now finally being disconnected by the forces being applied to the yoke that warning of the autopilot being disconnected together with the aircraft descending away from its cleared altitude override the audible stall warnings so it takes about four seconds before the stall warning actually comes on in the cockpit during the subsequent 21 seconds the captain who is still standing behind the center pedestal in the cockpit is screaming the other way turn left and the first officer is also saying the other way the other way presumably talking to 16 year old eldar who is holding on to the controls for his dear life now what should happen right now because the aircraft is in the stall is that you need to get out of the stall and the way to do that is to disconnect the autopilot to push the nose forward so that you unload the wings get out of the critical angle of attack only then once the wings are unstalled can you start to try to level off the bank and get it to wings level again but this does not happen the aircraft continues in its stalled situation descending very rapidly in a very steep right turn bank and it is pretty obvious from the corporate voice recorder that the pilots have lost their situational awareness in this situation it's worth noting here that one of the reasons that the pilot didn't react correctly in this situation was that at this time in this airline the pilots had not received any training in the simulator on how to deal with a high level offset stall and recovery procedure the time is now circle 55 minutes and 58 seconds and things are about to become even worse the aircraft is in an almost 90 degree right turn bank and a pitch down of 20 degrees which means that it's descending rapidly but as the autopilot disconnects this means that the high angle of attack protection system kicks in this forces the nose down even further in order to try to unload the wings that's the whole idea of that system but it means that the pitch altitude now changes from minus 20 degrees to minus 50 degrees which gives a terrifying descent rate of almost 39 000 feet per minute or 200 meters per second and since the outer throttle is still engaged and is set to thrust hold it means that the speed is now increasing rapidly and it passes 400 knots at time 0 56 minutes and 18 seconds the first officer suddenly exclamates to the left there there is the ground indicating that he's now regaining his situational awareness unfortunately he then also realizes how bad the situation is and instinctively he starts pulling back on his yoke this causes the elevator to go to full deflection and exert enormous g-forces on the aircraft around 4.7 gs was the highest recorded on the flight data recorder and that would have likely led to structural deformations of the aircraft these g-forces also made it extremely hard to move inside of the cockpit and the captain is now screaming get out to his son eldar but he is completely pinned down into the pilot seats because of these g-forces as the captain is trying to get into the seat the first officer is now fixating on the high speed situation that they're in and he's still sitting quite far back he can't properly reach the pedals but he can reach the truss level so he pulls them back to idle this in combination with the fact that they're now pitching up steeply means that the speed is now dropping from 400 knots down to only 100 knots within a few seconds during this part of the maneuver the g-forces are now letting off a bit which means that eldar can finally get out of the pilot seats and the captain can get back into it unfortunately as they are doing this one of them pushes the left hand rudder and in the situation they're now in with low speed full elevator back left bank and now suddenly a kick of the left rudder we have a classic spin entry and the aircraft goes into an immediate right hand spin which pitches the nose down again to almost vertical dive at this point the g-forces drops to zero which means that everyone on board is experiencing weightlessness now the captain is finally back in his seat and at time 0 57 minutes and 11 seconds the aircraft has actually stabilized itself a bit it's in a 20 degree left-hand bank and a 20 degree nose down position so it's still not good but it is likely that if the pilots would have just let the controls go here and the elevator would have been returned to a neutral position the aircraft might have stabilized its speed and it would have been possible for them to rectify the situation but instead the elevator is once again pulled back to its maximum deflection the aircraft pitches up and starts losing speed at time 0 57 minutes and 47 seconds someone pushes the left rudder again this once again creates the conditions for a spin the aircraft starts rotating at a higher and higher angular velocity and at this point the aircraft is at only about a thousand feet altitude so it is just too late and even though the pilots managed to stop the rotation the aircraft still crashes into the foothills of the kuneshki ala tau at the time 0-0 58 and 1 seconds this is only 3 minutes and 15 seconds after elder first sat down into the pilot seat and the whole upset took only 2 minutes and 25 seconds [Music] all 75 people on board immediately perishes as the aircraft impacts the ground it took several hours for the crash location to be found and the rescue workers had to travel there by helicopter because of its remote location fortunately the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder was fairly quickly found and they were in good condition which led to the investigators being able to piece together the reasons behind this crash which is as you heard really really tragic the final report concluded that the crash was due to the presence of an outsider in the pilot seat the fact that he unwittingly disconnected the lateral channel of the autopilot and that there was no warnings in the flight deck that that had happened that then led to an increasing in-flight upset situation which wasn't recognized by the flight crew and once it was recognized it wasn't handled properly probably partly because of the fact that the first officer who was the only pilot next to the controls was not in a seating position that was good enough to handle that situation this led to several recommendations as you might expect about cockpit security and who can actually access the cockpit but also how the pilots are supposed to be monitoring the flight and when they can and how they can leave their seats it also led to recommendations about flight training and offset and recovery from a high altitude stall as well as recommendations to the aircraft manufacturer airbus about the introduction of proper audible warnings in case the autopilot would disconnect one of its channels which was the case here but also about more audible bank angle warnings and several other systems improvements now if you want to see more videos about incidents and accidents then check out this playlist up here or this video up here which i think you're going to find really interesting if you want to support the work that i do consider becoming part of my awesome patreon crew or you can always get yourself some merch follow me on twitter instagram facebook and wherever you can find me and i hope that you're having an absolutely fantastic day bye

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,869,911

Keywords: captain, mentour pilot, mentor pilot, crash investigation, full epsiodes, aviation, pilot, crash, air crash investigation, final report, boeing, airbus, piper, cessna, disaster, fatal crash, air incident, air disasters 2022, Russia, a310, Sheremetyevo, aeroflot, Russian nationals, eldar, yana, teenagers, kids, cockpit, autopilot, spin entry, hong kong, kid in the cockpit, aeroflot flight 593

Id: V2mMs-h4qGE

Length: 25min 59sec (1559 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Agouti]

The crash was in 1994, for those wondering how they missed this in the news.

The really unfortunate part of this whole accident was if the pilots had just left the controls alone, the autopilot would have recovered and levelled the aircraft, but the combination of panic and trying to fly from between the seats caused extreme overcorrection of the dive and they ran out of altitude.

[u/alabasterwilliams]

Man, this broke my heart the first time I heard about it. There’s a video of cockpit audio set against radar and digital flight pattern, and while it’s obviously the pilot’s error, it is nonetheless tragic.

[u/tfc867]

That channel is great. Super interesting details of a lot of plane crashes and close calls over the years. And it actually makes me feel safer about flying, to know just how rigorous the whole process is.

[u/Ghitit]

What actually caused this crash was stupidity.

[u/myfakeyreddit]

The incident inspired a Michael Crichton book.

[u/arvigeus]

At some point Aeroflot was the king of stupidity related crashes. Like the pilot who took a bet with the copilot that he could land the plane entirely relying on instrument. He lost.

[u/triangulumnova]

Mentour Pilot is a fantastic channel. Really gets into the technical details of accidents like this.

[u/jamesmochrie]

Imagine how the passengers inside the plane must've felt as it was flying at a 90 degree angle then followed by a nosedive!

[u/Spetznazx]

I would NEVER fly on a Russian carrier, some of the worst disasters in aviation history has just come from their stupidty like yes other airlines had stupid pilots, but major accidents im never surprised when it's a Russian.

For example there was one where the pilots made a bet that they could land the plane with instruments only and CLOSED THE BLINDS. It's like seriously?