Five people were killed when a Japan Airlines plane carrying hundreds of passengers collided with an earthquake relief plane and burst into flames while landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday.
All 379 people on JAL Flight 516, including eight children under the age of two, were safely evacuated from the plane, but another Japanese Coast Guard plane was killed, the airline said.
The Airbus A350-900 caught fire after taking off from the northern Japanese city of Sapporo to Haneda at 5:46 p.m. local time (3:46 a.m. ET). The video showed a huge fireball erupting as the plane caught fire, leaving a fiery trail on the runway.
According to Japanese Transport Minister Tetsuo Saito, five crew members of the second plane, a De Havilland Canada DHC-8, were killed. Public broadcaster NHK reported that the captain of the plane was in critical condition.
Japan Airlines said four passengers were taken to hospitals, but the airline had no further reports of injuries, the airline’s vice president Noriyuki Aoki said at a news conference Tuesday night.
Japan Airlines is participating in an investigation to determine who is responsible for the fatal crash, Tadayuki Tsutsumi, the company’s vice president for safety, told reporters. France’s aviation agency is also sending its own investigators to Tokyo to look into the crash as part of an investigation team launched by the Japan Transport Safety Agency, the statement said.
In a later statement, Japan Airlines said its crew had given permission to air traffic control to land before the crash. LiveATC.net audio describes the crew rereading the clearance for Runway 34, which says “cleared for proper landing.”
“According to interviews with the operator’s crew, they acknowledged and repeated the landing from air traffic control and then proceeded with approach and landing procedures,” Japan Airlines said.
After landing, the Japan Air Lines Airbus A350 collided with a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft and caught fire, the statement said.
After the fire broke out, the plane was seen coming to a halt as people fled the inferno on emergency slides as firefighters tried to battle the growing flames. NHK reported that more than 100 fire engines were dispatched to the accident.
The next passenger on the plane, Frenchman Guy Maestre, reports hearing a “big explosion” during the Tuesday accident.
Maestre, who is traveling from Philadelphia to Japan, told CNN, “I hoped everyone was safe,” and that it was “shocking to see.”
As we prepared to take off, there was a loud bang outside my window seat on another aircraft.
“We noticed a massive trail of flames down the runway when we peered out our windows.
“The flames got higher and higher as we saw the fire trucks coming down the track.”
When word of the accident broke, Mika Yamake was en route to the airport to meet her husband, who was traveling on a JAL flight.
She told CNN, “I didn’t realize it was such a big incident until I saw images on the news.” “At first, there were merely reports of smoke, but as soon as I saw pictures of flames, my anxiety increased. My husband phoned me and that’s when I found out he was on the plane.
He told me he noticed smoke pouring out as he contacted me from inside. That he was secure pleased me. He just took his cell phone out. He was forced to abandon everything else.
When the plane landed, Mika’s husband, Satoshi Yamake, told CNN that he didn’t feel strange at first.
After being pulled from the wreckage, Yamake told CNN at Haneda airport, “We landed normally, didn’t feel a shock or anything.”
He continued by saying that he had witnessed a fire just before the jet was ordered to depart.
However, we later noticed fire emanating from the engines, which surprised me. The notification that “we probably hit something on the runway and we have to now evacuate the plane” came just as I was beginning to wonder why the fire had been blazing for so long, said Yamake. “We detected some smoke, but there wasn’t much panicking among the passengers.”
What is the size of an Airbus A350-900?
According to Japan Airlines, the aircraft that caught fire at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport following a collision with another aircraft was carrying 367 passengers and 12 staff members. On the Japan Coast Guard plane, five persons lost their lives, while the commercial plane suffered injuries from 17 passengers.
“I wasn’t really scared,” he declared.
“I was thinking the plane probably won’t blow up by now since we’ve already landed. As long as everyone disembarks from the plane in a timely manner, everything should be alright.
In response to Monday’s 7.5-magnitude earthquake, a Japan Coast Guard spokesperson told CNN that the agency’s planes were being flown from Haneda airport to an airbase in the prefecture of Niigata to assist with relief work.
Flight 516 was traveling from Sapporo’s New Chitose Airport in the Hokkaido province, on its way to Haneda. The airline reported that it was carrying 12 crew members in addition to 367 passengers, including eight infants.
According to NHK, most flights out of Haneda Airport have been canceled, and it’s not clear when they will start up again.
