When a parent let his children to pretend to fly a plane, what should have been a humorous occasion turned tragic. According to the Mirror, all 75 passengers and crew members on board Aeroflot Flight 593 perished in a terrible and avoidable aviation accident on March 23, 1994. A highly skilled crew, consisting of Captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov, First Officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov, and Relief Captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky, manned the doomed flight, which was traveling from Moscow to Hong Kong.

The three of them had flown thousands of hours together. But even their knowledge was powerless to stop the deadly results of an expensive choice. Relief Captain Kudrinsky found Flight 593 particularly memorable because it was his children Yana, 13, and Eldar, 15, their first overseas journey.

Kudrinsky brought his kids inside the cockpit to see him work in the hopes that the event would be remembered. The crew thought it was safe to let the kids sit at the controls because the autopilot was set, even though it was against airline rules.

Yana seized her father’s seat at around 12:43 AM and pretended to “fly” the aircraft. Eldar, her brother, took her place a few minutes later, adjusting the controls to make it look like she was flying. But at 12:54 AM, things took a bad turn. The aircraft switched to manual control after Eldar’s inputs to the control stick, which lasted more than 30 seconds and involved forces of up to 10 kilos, overrode the autopilot’s instructions.

To alert the crew, a tiny indicator light flashed, but the faint warning was ignored. The plane started to bank when the autopilot was turned off. The plane’s stability was upset by the wings’ slant, and it began to lose altitude. Realizing the danger, Captain Kudrinsky acted swiftly to remove his son from the cockpit seat, shouting: “Eldar, get away. Go to the back, go to the back Eldar! You see the danger don’t you? Go away, go away Eldar! Go away, go away. I tell you to go away!”

The pilots attempted to restore control, but they unintentionally overcorrected, which caused the aircraft to ascend steeply. This resulted in a stall and a spin that was impossible to recover from. Flight 593 crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau Mountain range in the Kemerovo Oblast region of southern Russia around 12:58 AM.

Everyone on board perished when the plane crashed and was destroyed. Aeroflot first disputed pilot mistake in the immediate aftermath. But the reality was eventually exposed by flight data and cockpit audio recordings, according to the New York Times. Human mistake and regulatory violations led to the tragedy. The crew’s failure to notice the autopilot’s disengagement and their choice to let kids in the cockpit ultimately contributed to the flight’s demise.