A Japan Airlines plane collided with a Japanese coast guard plane as it landed in Tokyo on Tuesday, causing the jetliner to catch fire and killing coast guard members on board the other plane leaving for relief after the earthquake.
The airline said all 367 passengers and 12 crew members on its plane were safely evacuated to Haneda Airport, according to public broadcaster NHK. Five crew members of the coast guard plane were killed, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a news conference.
Coast guard members were on their way to deliver supplies to the region hit by the powerful earthquake that struck western Japan on Monday, Mr. Kishida said.
“They were driven by a determined sense of mission and what happened to them is extremely regrettable and painful,” the Prime Minister said. “I express my deep condolences to their surviving families.”
The airline was praised for being able to safely evacuate 367 passengers under what was likely enormous pressure.
“The crew was spectacular in their reaction times,” said Trisha Ferguson, managing director of The Interaction Group, a company that designs safety cards for aircraft and an aviation industry expert with 28 years of involvement. in passenger safety education. “What they did was incredible.”
Japan Airlines was not immediately available for comment on the evacuation, but Ms Ferguson said the fact that all passengers managed to disembark safely in what could otherwise have been a fatal accident demonstrated successful cooperation between passengers and staff.
It is a general rule in aviation that, as part of their safety tests, new planes must demonstrate that all passengers can be evacuated within 90 seconds. But while in the 1970s and 1980s emergency training focused primarily on crew, Ms. Ferguson said, in the 1990s and 2000s there was a new emphasis on how passengers should be educated to respond to emergency situations.
In this case, passengers could see the fire outside the plane, prompting them to move faster and leave their luggage behind, which is often a source of slowdown in evacuations, said Mrs. Ferguson.
“It’s really a miracle,” she said, “that they got everyone out.”
“The cabin crew must have done a great job,” Paul Hayes, director of aviation safety at Ascend, a UK-based aviation consultancy, told Reuters. “It was a miracle that all the passengers got off.”
Mr Kishida added that government ministries would ensure that the accident “does not affect relief efforts” after the earthquake, which killed at least 55 people.
Footage broadcast by NHK showed the Japan Airlines plane on fire as it crossed a runway. The channel reported that the plane, Flight 516, took off from New Chitose Airport in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido and was scheduled to land in Haneda at 5:40 p.m.
Live footage after 6 p.m. showed firefighters trying to put out flames shooting from the plane, an Airbus A350-900.
The Coast Guard plane involved in the collision was a fixed-wing MA722, according to Naoko Kobayashi, a Coast Guard representative.
The Associated Press reported that Anton Deibe, 17, a Swede who was a passenger on the plane, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that “the entire cabin was filled with smoke within minutes” of the collision. “We threw ourselves on the ground. (…) Then the emergency doors opened and we threw ourselves at them.”
At a news conference Tuesday evening, Shigenori Hiraoka, director general of the civil aviation bureau at the Transportation Ministry, said he could not confirm any details about the collision or anything about communications between the ‘either plane and the air traffic control tower.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency cited a passenger who described feeling like the plane had hit something before suddenly rising. The passenger, who was not identified, then described seeing sparks outside the window and the cabin filling with gas and smoke.
In the United States, the NTSB and FAA said they had not been asked for assistance and did not comment directly on the accident.
Yoshio Seguchi, deputy director of the Japanese Coast Guard, apologized for the burden caused by the accident, but also gave few details about the cause of the accident. He said the Coast Guard plane began taxiing toward the runway around 4:45 p.m., about an hour before the collision.
Emma Boubola And Marc Walker reports contributed.