Investigators on Wednesday are probing the ground collision between two planes that occurred the day before at Tokyo's Haneda airport and left five people dead. Japan Airlines (JAL) said its plane was cleared to land.
• Also read: Five dead after two planes collided at Tokyo Haneda Airport
The 379 passengers and crew of flight JAL516 were evacuated after the plane collided during landing with a smaller Japanese Coast Guard plane that was preparing to take off.
The impact caused a large explosion and the JAL aircraft caught fire before coming to a stop further away. After all occupants were evacuated using inflatable slides at the front, it burned to the ground. According to the fire department, it took eight hours until the fire was completely extinguished.
Five of the Coast Guard plane's six occupants died, while the pilot managed to evacuate, although he was seriously injured.
AFP
They were preparing to leave to provide basic necessities to victims of Monday's gigantic earthquake in Ishikawa department, central Japan, which killed 62 people, according to a new preliminary report on Wednesday morning.
According to the fire department, 14 people on board flight JAL516 were slightly injured.
Did this plane, which arrived from Sapporo (northern Japan), have permission to land? Asked about this point during a press conference Tuesday evening, a Japan Airlines official replied: “As far as we understood, it was a given.”
The radio exchange from the Tokyo-Haneda control tower, which AFP consulted on the website LiveATC.net, appears to support this version.
“Japan 516, continue your landing approach,” an air traffic controller said at 5:43 p.m. local time on Tuesday, four minutes before the collision.
AFP
Conversely, an air traffic controller asked the coast guard aircraft to wait outside the runway, the television station NHK reported, citing a source in the Japanese Ministry of Transport.
According to a Coast Guard official also mentioned by NHK, the plane's commander said shortly after the accident that he had been cleared to take off.
Japan Airlines, the Coast Guard and the Japanese Ministry of Transport are currently refusing further official comment on the case, citing the ongoing investigation.
A team of experts from the French Civil Aviation Investigation and Analysis Office (BEA) is scheduled to arrive in Japan on Wednesday to take part in the investigation into the accident, as the JAL aircraft was an Airbus A350-900 manufactured in Toulouse (southwest of France).
AFP
For its part, Airbus also announced that it would send a team of specialists to provide “technical assistance” to the Japanese Transportation Safety Board (JTSB) in charge of the investigation.
Firefighters and investigators were busy on Wednesday guarding the charred ruins of the Coast Guard plane, a Dash 8, a Canadian short-haul airliner, still on a debris-strewn runway from Tokyo to Haneda, according to an AFP photographer at the scene stated.
Several hundred meters away, the blackened carcass of the Japan Airlines plane lies stranded on the grass between the runway and the sea.
Domestic flights at Tokyo Haneda Airport were all canceled on Tuesday evening after the accident, but most international flights continued to operate.
AFP
According to the airport's website, traffic remained disrupted on Wednesday morning, particularly on domestic flights, with around 70 departures canceled in the first half of the day.
Airplane accidents are extremely rare in Japan. The worst accident occurred in 1985 when a Japan Airlines plane crashed between Tokyo and Osaka, killing 520 people.
The deadliest aviation disaster in history remains the ground collision of two Boeing 747s in 1977 at Tenerife Airport in Spain's Canary Islands. 583 people were killed.