Gina Newport was not even given the courtesy of a phone call to ease her into the shattering confirmation that her husband Mark was one of the victims.

Flight SU 593 from Moscow to Hong Kong was due to arrive at Kai Tak at 6.55 on the morning of April 23, 1994, but had disappeared from radar four hours after takeoff.

Residents of a remote Siberian town were the last people to spot the Aeroflot Airbus A-310, when it took a violent nose-dive into a mountainside. It exploded into a ball of flames on impact.

All 12 crew members and 63 passengers perished. Gina and her family gazed at the television screen as reports came in that the plane had burned for hours before rescue workers made it through metre-high snowdrifts to the wreckage.

Another household was glued to the television in a state of unspeakable horror. Another woman had just lost a husband and the father of her 21-month-old boy.

Pauline Kan remembers speaking to her husband David Wong Wai-ming, 32, a few days before he was due to fly back from Moscow, where he had been on a business trip.

He was worried about flying with Aeroflot; he had heard less than favourable reports of their safety record.

The night he died, Pauline suddenly woke up in a cold sweat.

The next day, her father phoned her in the early evening to break the news.

Nancy Ng was at work when she received her phone call. Her brother, Ng Hoi-yeung was supposed to be flying back to Hong Kong that day after a year of studying in London.

He was only 23, a civil engineering student with a future. It was the first time he had been away from his family for that long.

By the time the newsreaders moved on to the next item on the seven o'clock news, three other families were devastated.

Once total strangers, these six families now meet on a regular basis and have been doing so for the past two years.

They remain composed and articulate whenever describing how they grieved together, vented anger and frustration at endless red tape, technical reports and legal jargon.

Regular phone calls to each other over the past two years focus on dilemmas such as the long-winded process of being granted Legal Aid.

They have tried to keep their plight in the spotlight, and have attempted to keep Aeroflot there with them.

The first anniversary of the crash was marked with an emotional demonstration outside Aeroflot's offices in Hong Kong.

But only now are the compensation proceedings to begin.

Together with another 19 families in countries ranging from Britain to Australia whose relatives were killed in the crash, they are set to file legal proceedings against the airline.

Aeroflot's representative in Hong Kong, Vassili Tkatchenko, is out of town, and was unable to comment.

The Russian airline first threw the families together at the bitterly cold Siberian wastelands where the plane had gone down.

They had been flown out to the crash site, although they saw virtually nothing.

In a helicopter, they circled around what seemed to be just endless snow. Pauline Kan, 36, remembers looking down at the suitcases scattered next to the twisted metal wreckage.

With a bemused look in her face, she recalls that the helicopter returned to base, and they never saw the luggage, or any other remains, again.

The trip sparked the relatives' first bout of outrage when reports emerged that a child had been at the controls of the ill-fated jet.

During the trip, the airline flatly denied the accusations, Ivy Kan Miu-ling, sister of Pauline remembers. One possible explanation they did receive, she said, was farcical.

'They said a cow may have been in the cockpit.

'In Moscow, the Aeroflot director said there were cows in the cockpit. If anyone was in there, it was a cow.

'We were very angry at that time. We continued to ask them what happened, why it happened, they denied it was their problem,' she said.

It took over a year for the crash report to come through.

The contents confirmed that the pilot's 15-year-old son Eldar had been at the controls of the plane moments before it plummeted.

Voice transcripts from the cockpit's 'black box' indicated that Eldar and his 13-year-old sister, Yana, were taking turns to sit in Captain Yaroslav Kudrinsky's seat.

At one point, Eldar asked if he could take the control wheel. 'May I turn this?' His father responded yes.

While he was in the seat, the autopilot declutched. This went unnoticed, until Eldar asked 'why is it turning?' His father had been busy talking to Yana.

The plane started to turn and descend, Eldar was ordered by his father to 'hold it [the wheel]!' The plane was brought into a stall, and Kudrinsky only managed to regain the controls moments before it hit the mountain.

The report said: 'Kudrinsky continued his efforts to take the left seat which is evidenced with his repeated commands addressed to his son 'Come out!' 'However, Eldar's leaving the left workplace and coming out was hampered by significant vertical overloads and narrow passage between the seat and the left cockpit wall.

'As a result of the A-310 airplane hitting the ground all the persons on board the airplane perished following fatal injuries [massive tissue destruction].

'The impact of the factors of high temperature and open fire on some crew members' and passengers' bodies are posthumous.' Concluding, the report said: 'The A-310 airplane crash occurred as a result of its getting in a stall and further passing into a spin and hitting the ground due to a combination of factors.' One such factor was 'Captain Kudrinsky's permission to take his workplace and interfere in the plane control procedure issued to an unauthorised person [his son] who had no right to do so, nor an appropriate qualification.' The transcripts were published just days after Aeroflot's lawyers made formal written offers of about US$20,000 (HK$154,400) as final compensation to families of the passengers.

In June, the families had been offered $130,000 in compensation. It was taken as an insult.

Acceptance would have been conditional on relatives discontinuing any legal action against Aeroflot or its insurers and undertaking not to sue in the future.

The sum was even below the US$20,000 liability which airlines are prepared to bear under the terms of the Warsaw Convention.

The families, however, wanted to take Aeroflot to court. At the time, London-based lawyer Nigel Taylor, who is acting for 25 of the families, said: 'We say this disaster was caused by some of the most egregious conduct ever in civil aviation crashes. It is scarcely believable what went on.' Experienced in the field of airline liability cases, Taylor reiterated this sentiment, speaking from London this week.

'It's the most extreme set of facts I have ever come across. It's astonishing,' he said, adding that he wanted to avoid 'extreme language'.

The nature of these compensation cases, however, is that the proceedings are lengthy.

'This could go on for several more years. It's not unusual for an investigation into the crash to take two years.

'Such is the complexity of why an airline crashes. From the point of view of compensation, it's always difficult to know who to pursue. We always have to see if you can get a settlement before going to court.

'And unfortunately, that process is impaired by the Warsaw Convention. There's a lot of talk about changing it.

'It's a draconian regime which puts a very low cap on compensation for families [US$20,000]. To overcome that problem, it involves a lengthy court case,' he said.

Not much reassurance for a family which has just lost its main breadwinner.

'I'm afraid that's the ugly reality that is often the case,' Taylor said.

'Families are often financially prejudiced unless they have their own insurance cover.

'The airline is often just prepared to offer the $20,000 and close the file.

'For someone who needs the money desperately they are prepared to do that. But it doesn't last very long in any country these days,' he said.

Pauline Kan was forced to take up full-time work to support her and her son, Victor.

'My family helped. Before, I had stayed at home to look after Victor. I wanted to do this until he was old enough for school.

'Now I work a full day.

'Psychologically, it affected me a lot. Before, when I did things, I felt very confident. Now I feel nervous,' she said.

Gina Newport, 28, was left with an empty flat in Lantau after Mark died. Her sister, Mary Ann Sparrow, 27, remembers however, how calm she remained during the first year.

'So many things had been planned. I was going to get married, Mark was supposed to be the usher.

'It was so devastating for everyone. Gina didn't feel she could face the wedding, she didn't come.

'She got to thinking, now she was the only person making money, she's got to work harder than she used to.

'In the flat, it was only her and Mark. She didn't want to move out. She kept all his things, all the clothes.

'My parents, in the end, moved in with her. They're still living with her,' she said.

It took months before her colleagues could persuade her to go out. She has not had a boyfriend since Mark died.

Gina wants to talk about the accident. Mary Ann says: 'She used to be shy. Now she's really talkative, she wants to talk about it, get it out her system.

'She knows the compensation could take 10 years. She's quite prepared to wait that long.

'But the longer it takes, the more people seem to forget what's happened. People have started forgetting,' she said.

Nancy Ng, 31, moved in with her father for the first six months after the crash.

Ng Ping-yuen, 62, had been extremely close to his son, and Nancy fears he will never come to terms with his death.

'He's a gentle man. I was always scared he would forget to switch off the gas and things like that, so I moved in.

'He still doesn't believe this [the death] is true. He wants to get his son back,' she said.

Her father has since moved back to live with relatives in the mainland. He could not face seeing his son's friends. He felt he could not even face neighbours. He talks to his son regularly, Nancy says. He sees him in his bedroom, he can't accept he's gone.

All the relatives cannot believe that people still board Aeroflot's planes every day. Moreover, they cannot understand how such a breach of basic safety rules could be 'shrugged off', Mary Ann says.

'I would say the negligence of the people, the pilot or the company, besides that, no matter what had happened in the past, to Aeroflot it seemed as if it was nothing to them.' 'It's very disappointing. A few months after the accident, there was a festival about Russia. Mr Tkatchenko was introducing people to Aeroflot in Hong Kong.

'I wrote to the letters page of newspapers, saying this should not happen, Russia should not do this.' She hopes, that through the legal proceedings, 'if we have suffered by losing our family, hopefully they suffer by losing Aeroflot'.

Pauline Kan has not been on a plane since she saw the wreckage strewn on the snow in Siberia.

Nancy Ng has flown a few times. The turbulence upsets her.

Mary Ann has a similar problem.

'Whenever I sit on a plane, when they shut all the windows and doors, and the lights go down, if a stewardess goes and whispers something to someone, I know they're going to the cockpit. I get scared.'