Hoping, accidently killing the engine, and allowing children to fiddle with the controls: The greatest mistakes pilots made prior to a crash were discovered

We entrust the pilot with our lives each and every time we get on an aircraft.

A frightening notion, given that human mistake accounts for the great majority of crashes instead than any other cause. Even though these occurrences are still extremely uncommon—roughly one in 11 million—there have been terrible instances in the past of crashes that were avoidable due to significant errors made by the pilot.

This list of the worst pilot errors that have ever caused a plane disaster was put together by MailOnline.

The most absurd of them was perhaps when Yaroslav Kudrinsky, the relief pilot and co-pilot’s second in command, allowed his kids to tinker with the controls. On March 23, 1994, an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Kong Kong was involved in the tragic crash.

All 75 people on the downed Airbus A310 in Siberia perished in the crash. Yana, 12, and Eldar, 15, were invited into the cockpit by Mr. Kudrinsky in the middle of the night, as was subsequently shown by cockpit recordings.

Despite the plane being in autopilot mode, both were permitted to experiment with the controls while seated in the captain’s chair.

However, Eldar had to push the system back into manual mode by holding down the control column for a full thirty seconds. It was already too late when the captain and co-pilot returned to their seats and grabbed the controls. All everyone on board perished as the aircraft crashed into the mountains below.

On February 4, 2015, the captain of TransAsia flight 235 said some of the final things he would before the aircraft crashed into a Taiwanese highway bridge, killing 43 of the 58 occupants. As per the report issued by the Taiwan Aviation Safety Council, the aircraft had barely departed from Songshan Airport in Taipei when an engine failed.

The aircraft banked hard, clipped the Huandong Viaduct, and then nosedived into the Keelung River below as the pilot—who was also murdered along with the co-polit—inadvertently pulled the wrong throttle, turning off the other operational engine.

The pilot and co-pilot of Tuninter Flight 1153, which plunged into the Mediterranean Sea in 2005, received ten-year prison terms in March 2009 for their roles in the sixteen passenger deaths. When the plane experienced a mechanical malfunction and ran out of fuel, the crew, Captain Shafik Al Gharbi and co-pilot Ali Kebaier Lassoued, were accused of praying rather of initiating emergency procedures and tumbling towards the water.

According to The Guardian, Mr. Gharbi was heard pleading for assistance from “Allah and Muhammad his prophet” in cockpit recordings that were shown in court. There is proof that the crew tried multiple times to save the situation but finally gave up in a panic and let the disaster happen. The aircraft was headed to Bari.

23 of the 49 people on board the aircraft, which was travelling from Djerba, Tunisia, to Bari, Italy, survived after being pulled out of the water

583 people were killed in what is still the deadliest aviation catastrophe in history when two jumbo aircraft collided, and it was all due to communication problems. The two Boeing 747s, KLM Flight 1736 and Pan Am Flight 1736, collided at Tenerife Airport in March 1977. The Pan Am plane was still on the runway when the KLM plane attempted to take off, resulting in misunderstandings between the flight crew and Air Traffic Control that led to the crash.

That day, there was so much fog that they were unable to see each other. In the KLM plane, all 248 passengers and crew members perished; in the Pan Am, 326 passengers and nine crew members perished.

Seven crew members and the remaining fifty-four passengers on board the Pan Am plane, including the captain, made it out alive.

On July 28, 2010, a domestic passenger airplane went down in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, killing all 146 passengers and six crew members. It might have been averted if the co-pilot of the aircraft had questioned the captain’s frequent mistakes, but as Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority stated in November 2011, the captain had been ‘humiliated’ by his supervisor throughout the flight and had ‘lost his self-esteem’.

Throughout the flight, the captain was accused of speaking to his co-pilot in a “harsh, snobbish, and contrary” manner multiple times. Subsequently, he disregarded weather alerts from ATC, stating, “Let him say whatever he wants to say.” His copilot did not confront him until the catastrophe.

The pilot lost control of the aircraft due to severe monsoon weather and panicked. His co-pilot did not step in to save the aircraft, causing it to crash into the Margalla Hills.

Before the accident on January 13, 1982, the pilots of Air Florida Flight 90 from Washington, DC to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, committed a number of mistakes, the most significant of which was probably forgetting to turn on the de-icing equipment.

Not only did the crew take off in a snowstorm, but they also made the foolish decision to melt their own ice using a “reverse thrust” instead of going back to the gate for appropriate de-icing, and they continued to take off even after realizing there was a power issue.

Thirty seconds after takeoff, the plane crashed into the Potomac River. Only five of the 79 passengers on board made it out alive, while four more persons on the ground were murdered when they were struck.

Seventy-five people survived the December 29, 1972, crash of an Eastern Airlines Tristar aircraft into the Florida Everglades, killing 101 people on board, including the captain. It happened when, near the end of the trip from New York’s JFK to Miami, the captain and co-pilot became sidetracked by a burned-out bulb. They were looking into a faulty landing gear indicator light when someone unintentionally hit a lever, turning off the aircraft’s autopilot.