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The cockpit voice recorder on an Aeroflot jetliner that crashed in Siberia last March confirms that the pilot's teen-age son was at the controls when the plane began to dive, published reports said today.
A transcript of the tape printed in the magazine Obozrevatel shows that the Russian crew nearly managed to save the Airbus plane and the 75 people on board, but that it was hampered by the presence of children and its unfamiliarity with the foreign-made plane. That analysis was supported by an analysis by a Russian aviation expert published in the newspaper Rossiiskiye Vesti.
Everyone on the flight from Moscow to Hong Kong was killed in the crash on March 22.
Airline officials had disputed early findings that children were in the cockpit. But the tapes show that in the half hour before the crash, the pilot, Yaroslav Kudrinsky, gave up his seat to his 12-year-old daughter and then his 16-year-old son.
"Daddy, can I turn this?" the daughter, Yana, asks as she sits at the controls.
Her father points out stars and city lights, and warns her not to push any buttons.
The scene quickly turns terrifying, however, when the captain's son, Eldar, takes the wheel.
"Turn it! Watch the ground as you turn," the captain says. "Let's go left. Turn left! (pause) Is the plane turning?"
"Great!" says Eldar.
But four minutes later, he asks, "Why is it turning?"
"It's turning by itself?" his father asks.
"Yes!"
Then the co-pilot shouts, "Guys!" as the plane begins to dive.
There is a low whistling sound and a roar. For the next two and a half minutes, the tapes record the crew's frantic efforts to regain control.
A state air-safety investigator, Vsevolod Ovcharov, was quoted in the Rossiiskiye Vesti newspaper as saying the children were just one factor in "a chain of events and fateful circumstances."
Turning the wheel apparently shut off the automatic pilot, Mr. Ovcharov said. He said that this would not have happened in a Russian-made plane, and that the crew apparently did not notice.
Mr. Ovcharov said the boy's foot "accidentally pushed the right pedal, sending the aircraft into a spin." He added, "The situation became irreversible."
The crew pulled the plane out of the spin, but too late -- when it was just 1,300 feet off the ground.