Russian Air Roulette

By Kevin Fedarko

What could have caused Aeroflot Flight 593 to drop headlong out of the sky on March 22? For nearly a fortnight, international aviation officials asked themselves that question. Was it a technical failure? A terrorist bomb? A stray bird? All they knew was that the Hong Kong-bound Airbus A-310 disappeared from radar and exploded deep in the Siberian taiga . . . until last week, when the plane's flight recorder finally yielded a haunting clue: the voice of a child.

Somewhere over the Altai Mountains, experts at Montreal's International Air Transport Association now believe, Captain Yaroslav Kudrinski's 15-year-old son -- who, with his sister, was apparently receiving a lesson from Dad on how to fly the plane -- inexplicably may have disengaged the plane's autopilot, stalling the craft and sending it into a dive. In a desperate effort to stave off disaster, someone lunged for the instrument panel. Whoever it was very nearly succeeded; Flight 593 crashed with its nose slightly up and its wings level, indicating that seconds before impact, someone regained at least control.

Although Aeroflot officials still dispute this version of the crash, this much is clear: 75 more people are now dead in a country where air crashes last year killed nearly five times as many people as in 1987. This year the numbers are even worse: already, 195 people have died in what is becoming the deadliest season in the history of Russian civil aviation. Indeed, so dangerous have the post-Soviet skies become that this week the International Airline Passengers' Association will begin advising its members "not to fly to, in or over Russia. It's simply too dangerous."

That will no doubt be seen by many as a richly deserved rebuke to an airline whose 3,000 planes and 600,000 employees once freighted more passengers more miles in greater discomfort than any other carrier in the world. During the past three years, however, the stock-in-trade tales of Aeroflot's imperious cabin crews, wretched meals and white-knuckle landings that once left travelers laughing nervously in the aisles have turned decidedly unfunny.

After the Soviet Union toppled in December 1991, the air giant splintered into more than 150 smaller, independent carriers while the centralized system of maintenance, safety inspections and quality control vanished into thin air. The effect on safety has been chilling. In Armenia last December, 34 people died when a cargo plane illegally carrying passengers crashed and exploded like a Molotov cocktail. Examiners later determined that the aircraft had been loaded with two poorly secured automobiles stuffed with cans of gasoline, and that many of the passengers were also clutching jugs of gasoline as carry-on luggage. In Irkutsk this January, the pilot of a Tupolev-154 ignored a warning from a flight engineer that one of the engines was "dangerous." One hour later, the aircraft caught fire in midair and crashed, killing all 120 people on board.

Perhaps such incidents should come as no surprise from the heirs of an airline whose legacy includes a pilot who, in 1986, tried to demonstrate his feel for an Aeroflot passenger jet by attempting to land with the cockpit blinds closed. More than 60 people were killed. But like the skipper, who survived, the tradition lives on. During a recent flight from northern Russia to Moscow, one curious passenger discovered a party in progress at the back of the plane. Vodka and sandwiches were being shared by most of the crew, including the copilot who, less than an hour from landing, had passed out drunk on a mountain of baggage.

The worst offenders are the domestic carriers. For a bribe of about 20,000 rubles on top of the price of the ticket, most attendants and pilots will be only too happy to accommodate latecomers by jamming the aisles and cargo bins with standing room only. On many flights, preflight safety briefings are nonexistent; smoking is permitted before, during and after takeoff; access to emergency exits and even the toilets is blocked by everything from sacks of potatoes to wire cages filled with twittering birds.

And then there are the delays. Glassy-eyed passengers can spend days huddled in dimly lit waiting rooms called, with spectacular aptness, "accumulators." Last summer, after enduring four stuporous days stranded in Moscow's Vnukovo airport, 350 passengers stormed the runway in an attempt to force a plane to take them home. Riot police were called in, and three people were injured.

Perhaps such chaos is an inevitable by-product of an economy turned upside down, but aviation experts warn that air travel is an enterprise in which even minute compromises in standards are inevitably measured in human lives. "Russian air safety," says Dan Cook, editor of Air Safety Week, "unfortunately is an oxymoron." Cook means what he says: on a recent inspection trip to Moscow, he and a team of safety inspectors declined to use Aeroflot. They flew Finnair instead.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Sally B. Donnelly/Moscow and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral