(Tokyo) Investigators are looking Wednesday into the ground collision between two planes that occurred the day before at Tokyo-Haneda airport, which left five people dead, with Japan Airlines (JAL) claiming that its aircraft was authorized to land.
The 379 passengers and crew members of flight JAL516 were evacuated after the airliner collided as it landed with a smaller Japanese Coast Guard aircraft, which was preparing to take off.
The impact caused a large explosion, and the JAL plane caught fire before coming to rest further away. It burned to the ground after all its occupants were evacuated using inflatable slides at the front. It took eight hours to completely extinguish the fire, according to firefighters.
Five of the six occupants of the Coast Guard plane died, while the pilot managed to evacuate, although seriously injured.
They were preparing to take off to provide basic necessities to those affected by Monday’s gigantic earthquake in the Ishikawa department (central Japan), which left 62 dead according to a new provisional report Wednesday morning.
Fourteen people who were on board flight JAL516 were slightly injured, according to firefighters.
“Japan 516, continue your approach”
Did this airliner, which arrived from Sapporo (northern Japan), have permission to land? Asked about this point during a press briefing on Tuesday evening, a Japan Airlines official replied: “From what we understood, it had been given.”
Radio exchanges from the Tokyo-Haneda control tower, which AFP consulted on the LiveATC.net site, seem to support this version.
“Japan 516, continue your approach,” an air traffic controller said Tuesday at 5:43 p.m. local time (3:43 a.m. Eastern), four minutes before the collision.
Conversely, an air traffic controller would have asked the coast guard plane to wait away from the runway, according to the NHK television channel citing a source within the Japanese Ministry of Transport.
But according to a coast guard official also mentioned by NHK, the commander of the aircraft declared just after the accident that he had obtained permission to take off.
Japan Airlines, the Coast Guard and the Japanese Ministry of Transport are currently refusing to make further official comments on the case, citing the ongoing investigation.
A team of experts from the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) for Civil Aviation is due to arrive in Japan on Wednesday to participate in the investigation into the accident, given that the JAL plane was an Airbus A350 -900, produced in Toulouse (southwest of France).
Airbus also announced that it would send a team of specialists to provide “technical assistance” to the Japanese Transportation Safety Board (JTSB), responsible for the investigation.
Traffic still disrupted at Tokyo-Haneda
Firefighters and investigators were busy Wednesday around the charred ruins of the coast guard aircraft, a Dash 8, a Canadian short-haul, which was still on a debris-strewn Tokyo-Haneda runway, a photographer noted of the AFP on site.
Several hundred meters further on lies the blackened carcass of the Japan Airlines plane, stranded on the lawn between the runway and the sea.
Domestic flights at Tokyo-Haneda were all canceled Tuesday evening following the accident, but the majority of international flights continued to operate.
Airport traffic remained disrupted on Wednesday morning, especially for domestic flights, of which around 70 departures were canceled in the first part of the day, according to its website.
Accidents involving airliners are extremely rare in Japan. The most serious of these occurred in 1985, when a Japan Airlines plane crashed between Tokyo and Osaka, killing 520 people.
The deadliest air disaster in history remains the ground collision of two Boeing 747s in 1977 at Tenerife airport, in the Spanish Canary Islands. 583 people were then killed.