The pilots of the Japan Airlines (JAL) plane involved in Tuesday's spectacular accident at Tokyo Haneda Airport said they did not see the plane they collided with and did not feel an “impact” until landing .
• Also read: Collision at Tokyo Haneda Airport: JAL says its plane has been cleared to land
• Also read: Five dead after two planes collided at Tokyo Haneda Airport
“We couldn’t make eye contact [avec l’avion des garde-côtes, ndlr]”The pilots told us,” a JAL spokesman told AFP about the accident, which killed five passengers among the passengers of the Bombardier Dash 8, which was hit by the Japanese company's Airbus.
“They say the wheels felt the impact just as they were touching the ground or about to touch it,” he added. “One of the three pilots told us he saw an object shortly before impact.”
AFP
At 5:47 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as night fell over Tokyo, JAL516 from Sapporo in the north of the archipelago collided while landing with a smaller aircraft that was about to take off towards the Noto Peninsula (center). On Monday, an incident occurred terrible earthquake.
The impact caused an impressive explosion and the Airbus A350-900 immediately caught fire and came to rest on the edge of the runway a few hundred meters away.
All 379 passengers and crew on the plane were evacuated before the Airbus went up in smoke on the edge of the runway.
The JAL spokesman also clarified that the pilots were initially unaware that their plane was on fire.
AFP
“Unlike vehicles, they don’t have rear-view mirrors. When the fire broke out [à l’arrière de l’appareil], they couldn't see him from the cockpit. It was the cabin crew who warned them, said the JAL spokesman.
According to television station NHK, they only became aware of the fire when the cabin manager asked them for permission to open the emergency exits and when smoke and intense heat began to enter the cabin, causing panic.
Due to the fire, only two slides at the front of the plane could be activated, according to NHK.
“Human error”
18 minutes passed between the impact (5:47 p.m.) and the moment when the last person, the captain, was on the tarmac (6:05 p.m.).
AFP
“I'm surprised that she [les passagers] came off the plane without a scratch [ndlr: le bilan compte 15 blessés] due to the force of the impact. If we model such an accident on a runway, we assume that the two planes will be destroyed and there will be many victims,” Guido Carim Junior, an expert in the field, commented to AFP on Thursday. Griffith University in Australia.
The causes of the collision are still unclear, but “human error” likely contributed, say two aviation experts, Doug Drury of the University of Central Queensland and Terence Fan of the Singapore Management University, who were also interviewed by the AFP.
During a press conference on Tuesday evening, a Japan Airlines manager confirmed that the Airbus had been “granted” permission to land, a version confirmed by radio exchanges from the control tower, AFP saw on the website LiveATC.net.
“Japan 516, clearance to land,” we hear from an air traffic controller at 5:45 p.m. local time, two minutes before the collision.
According to the continuation of this radio exchange reported by the Japanese Ministry of Transport on Wednesday, a few seconds later the control tower asked the coast guard aircraft to move to an off-track holding point.
But according to a Coast Guard official mentioned by NHK, the Bombardier's surviving pilot claimed shortly after the accident that he had been cleared to take off.
A team of experts from the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) as well as British and Canadian experts will investigate the causes of what could be the worst aviation disaster in history.
Airbus also said it would send a “technical assistance” team to support the Japan Transport Safety Committee’s investigation.