Japan Airlines plane crashes with coast guard plane upon landing at Haneda Airport just outside Tokyo. 379 passengers and crew from airliner saved, 5 coast guard crew members dead. Questions abound.
A Japanese airliner carrying 379 passengers and crew exploded and caught on fire after colliding with a coast guard plane as it came into land, Japanese media reported.
Footage showed the Japan Airlines jet engulfed in flames as it hurtled down the runway just moments after having landed at Haneda Airport, in Ota City, Tokyo during the early morning hours of Tuesday.
JAL — Japan Airlines — says the Airbus A350 plane, Flight #516 carrying 367 passengers and 12 crew members had taken off from New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido only to collide with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft upon landing.
A #Japan Airlines passenger jet caught fire after colliding with a Coast Guard plane while landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. All 379 passengers and crew evacuated safely. Scary visuals capture the fully ablaze aircraft on the runway. #HanedaAirport #JapanAirlines #Tokyo pic.twitter.com/l2AucbZe0N
— Marcos Oliveira 📸🗞️ (@AeroMarcos320) January 2, 2024
Japan Airlines cause of crash
While all 379 passengers and crew on board the Japan Airlines flight survived, initial reports told of only one member of the crew from the coastguard plane escaping, with the other five remaining crew unaccounted for, Japan’s NHK reported.
The Japan Coast Guard confirmed six people were on board its plane. One person evacuated while the other five were found but their condition remained unknown, the Tokyo Fire Department stated.
Follow up reports indicated that most of the coast guard plane crew had died.
Questions remained as to how the crash came to happen, whether the coast guard plane had come to cross the path of the incoming plane, or some other instance leading to the collision of the two vessels.
Accident investigators would be looking why two aircraft were in the same location simultaneously and whether they were both where they should have been, Sky News reported.
🔴#ÚltimaHora#Japón| Pasajeros del vuelo JL516 de Japan Airlines, compartieron en redes sociales, imágenes del interior de la aeronave, después de la colisión en el Aeropuerto Internacional de Tokio-Haneda.
🎥@BNONews #NewsOnDemand pic.twitter.com/MOH4RIGzqu
— News On Demand (@OnDemand_News) January 2, 2024
Japan dealing with back to back tragedy
A coast guard official at Haneda Airport, one of the world’s busiest, said they were ‘checking details’.
‘It’s not clear if there was a collision. But it is certain that our plane is involved,’ he told AFP.
Officials said the coast guard plane was preparing to fly to Niigata for earthquake relief one day after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake devastated huge swathes of Japan‘s west coast, killing dozens of people and levelling tens of thousands of homes.
Video shared on social media showed flames pouring out of passenger windows towards the back of the plane upon the large airliner finally came to a rest.
Flames were seen licking the airliner’s windows and doors as smouldering debris fell from the fuselage onto the tarmac.
Images from the scene showed how the passenger escape slide protruding from one of the airliner’s doors was set ablaze as more flames burned within the cabin. Video footage captured passengers sprinting along the runway to escape the blaze.
Fire crews were deployed to the scene immediately, with footage showing firefighters desperately trying to extinguish the flames with multiple hoses.
More than 70 fire engines were being deployed, NHK reported.
The blaze completely gutted the plane and melted through huge chunks of its bodywork.
Japan has not suffered a serious commercial aviation accident in decades.
Its worst ever was in 1985, when a JAL jumbo jet flying from Tokyo to Osaka crashed in central Gunma region, killing 520 passengers and crew.
That disaster was one of the world’s deadliest plane crashes involving a single flight.
