On Tuesday, January 2, a passenger plane caught fire on the runway at Tokyo Haneda Airport in Japan. According to Japanese public television, all 379 people on board the plane were evacuated and five people were missing.
A Japan Airlines plane caught fire on a runway at Tokyo Haneda Airport in Japan on Tuesday, January 2, according to images from public broadcaster NHK. An airline spokesperson told NHK that the plane's 367 passengers and 12 crew members were evacuated.
There were six people on board the Coast Guard aircraft. NHK told NHK that one of them escaped, but the whereabouts of the other five remained unknown.
In these short images taken at 5:47 p.m. local time (8:47 a.m. GMT), we could see the plane taxiing on the tarmac before an explosion occurred, leaving a trail of flames behind the plane then slowed down.
Passengers of a plane evacuated
According to Japan Airlines, cited by NHK, the plane collided with what appeared to be a Japanese Coast Guard plane after landing at Tokyo Haneda Airport. According to several local media outlets, the airliner was JAL 5016, an Airbus A350-900, coming from Sapporo (northern Japan).
“It is not clear whether there was a collision or not. What is certain is that our aircraft was involved,” a coast guard official at the airport told AFP. Tokyo-Haneda.
Closed slopes
All of the airport's runways were closed, an airport spokesman in the Japanese capital said, while firefighters tried to put out the flames.
Tokyo-Haneda is one of the Japanese capital's two international airports and one of the busiest in the world. Airplane accidents are extremely rare in Japan. The worst disaster occurred in 1985 when a Japan Airlines plane crashed between Tokyo and Osaka, killing 520 people, one of the world's worst aviation disasters.