On 23 March 1994, the aircraft operating the route, an Airbus A310-304 flown by Aeroflot, crashed into the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range in Kemerovo Oblast, killing all 63 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

The autopilot then disengaged completely, causing the aircraft to roll into a steep bank and a near-vertical dive.

Despite managing to level the aircraft, the first officer over-corrected when pulling up, causing the plane to stall and enter into a spin; the pilots managed to level the A310 once more, but the plane had descended beyond a safe altitude to initiate a recovery and subsequently crashed into the mountain range.

The aircraft involved in the accident was a leased Airbus A310-304, registration F-OGQS, serial number 596, that was delivered new to Aeroflot on 11 December 1992.

The pilots, who had previously flown Soviet-designed planes that had audible warning signals, apparently failed to notice the silent indicator light.

This confused the pilots for nine seconds, during which time the plane banked past a 45° angle to almost 90°, steeper than the A310's design allowed.

During the spin, Kudrinsky managed to almost recover the plane but pulled back the yoke too aggressively, causing their speed to drop.

Although Kudrinsky and Piskaryov managed to regain control again and leveled out the wings, they did not know how far they had descended and their altitude by then was too low to recover.

[15] Sixteen minutes elapsed between Kudrinsky's children first taking the pilot's seat and the aircraft crashing.

[3] Despite the struggles of both pilots to save the aircraft, it was later concluded that if they had simply let go of the yoke after the first spin, aerodynamic principles would have caused the plane to return to level flight, thus preventing the crash.

[11][16] The wreckage was located on a remote hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain chain,[17] about 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Mezhdurechensk, Kemerovo Oblast; the flight data recorders were found on the second day of searching.

"[18] Michael Crichton's novel Airframe, published in 1996, draws on events from the accidents of Aeroflot 593 and China Eastern Airlines Flight 583.