On March 23, 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 crashed into the Siberian mountains in a tragedy defined not by mechanical failure, but by human error. The Airbus A310 was cruising smoothly from Moscow to Hong Kong when Captain Yaroslav Kudrinsky invited his two children into the cockpit—an unsafe but not uncommon practice at the time.

While the autopilot was engaged, his 15-year-old son Eldar applied sustained pressure to the controls. Unbeknownst to the crew, this caused the autopilot’s roll control to partially disengage without triggering an alarm. The aircraft slowly entered a steep bank, lost lift, and stalled.

As G-forces pinned the pilots to their seats, confusion and disorientation set in. Though they briefly recovered, the crew overcorrected in the darkness and stalled the aircraft a second time. With no altitude left, the plane slammed into the mountains, killing all 75 people on board.

Flight 593 remains a stark reminder that even the most advanced technology cannot compensate for ignored safety rules—and that some disasters are entirely avoidable.