It took firefighters more than six hours to extinguish the blaze that engulfed a Japan Airlines jet after it struck another plane on landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday. Earlier, it had taken the 12 crew members just minutes to usher hundreds of people on board to safety.
As petrified passengers watched flames lick the windows while the cabin filled with smoke, JAL flight attendants hid their unease and drew on every last detail of their safety training. According to the airline, all 367 passengers and 12 crew disembarked in 18 minutes, although it is not immediately clear how much of the time was spent physically getting passengers down slides.
As Japanese and international aviation experts attempt to establish how a Japan Coast Guard De Havilland Dash-8 – five of whose six occupants perished – came to lie directly in the path of the Airbus A350, the men and women whose actions averted a major disaster during those vital minutes have been praised for their composure and professionalism.
The pilot who brought the skidding plane, now resembling a fireball, to a halt on its nose; the crew who, unable to use the damaged PA system, calmly issued instructions through megaphones; and the passengers, who remained seated before making their way to evacuation slides, leaving their carry-on luggage to the flames.
Real-time images filmed from the terminal building at Haneda – one of two international airports serving the capital – show the plane in flames as it careered down the runway, suggesting claims of a miracle escape are far from hyperbolic.
Inside the aircraft, confusion quickly turned to horror as passengers noticed that an engine had caught fire seconds after the plane landed at the end of an early-evening flight from Shin Chitose airport on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.
“I was laughing a bit at first when I could see sparks coming out [of the engine], but when the fire started, I realised it there was more to it than that,” said Tokyo resident Tsubasa Sawada. “I really thought I was going to die.”
Widely shared video footage shows flight attendants at the front of a darkened cabin gesturing for passengers to remain seated and thanking them for their cooperation. At one point, the camera pans across to show a window frame filled with orange light.
“Please get me out of here,” one woman shouts in the video. A child is heard asking: “Why don’t you just open the doors?”
The actions of crew and passengers have been credited with averting tragedy. Incredibly, none received serious injuries. As firefighters arrived to begin battling the flames, the crew had already deployed the escape chutes – the cue for almost 400 people, including several young children, to slide to safety.
Critically, none appeared to have paused to retrieve hand luggage from overhead lockers, ensuring a clear route to the emergency exits. Less than two hours earlier, the passengers had watched a JAL safety video urging them to do exactly that. In the video, a flight attendant warns: “Leave your baggage when you evacuate!”, extending her open palms for emphasis. An animated sequence then shows the damage that bags and high-heeled shoes can cause to the inflatable evacuation slides.
Aviation experts said the unshakeable composure displayed by the flight attendants combined with the high level of cooperation among passengers probably prevented a deeply unsettling experience becoming a major disaster.
“The cabin crew must have done an excellent job. There don’t seem to be any carry-ons. It was a miracle that all the passengers got off,” said Paul Hayes, director of air safety at the UK-based aviation consultancy Ascend by Cirium.
Michele Robson, a former air traffic controller, said the crew had done “really well to evacuate under very difficult circumstances”. She told Channel 4 News: “It’s natural for passengers to start panicking when they see flames, and obviously there had been come sort of collision, which must have been extremely worrying for those on board.”
John Cox, a pilot and founder of a US-based aviation safety consultancy, said the cabin crew “did a remarkably great job” getting passengers off the plane so quickly. “It shows good training,” he said. “And if you look at the video, people are not trying to get stuff out of the overheads. They are concentrating on getting out of the airplane.”
The rigorous insistence on safety during the evacuation is rooted in better aircraft design and tougher standards across the industry, but also in JAL’s part in the most deadly accident in aviation history involving a single aircraft.
On 12 August 1985, a JAL jumbo jet crashed into a mountain en route from Tokyo to Osaka, killing 520 of the 524 people on board.
While the cause was traced to a faulty repair carried out by Boeing engineers and not to pilot error, the crash and its aftermath have left an indelible mark on the carrier’s safety culture, including a display of torn fuselage and damaged seats retrieved from the wreckage intended to raise awareness about safety among JAL employees.
Almost four decades on, the carrier is regularly named as one of the world’s safest airlines by the website airlineratings.com.
“Japan has a phenomenal record when it comes to transport safety,” Prof Graham Braithwaite, director of transport systems at Cranfield University in the UK, told the BBC, describing JAL as a “world leader” in safety.
“The evacuation has been successful and is a reminder of how much has gone into training cabin crew,” he added. “Their focus is on safety. They are the last people to evacuate the airplane and on face value, it looks like they have done an incredible job.”
Like every one of his fellow passengers, Sawada, who was returning from Hokkaido from a holiday with his girlfriend, tried to suppress thoughts of what might have been, had the evacuation taken longer.
About 10 minutes after disembarking, there was an explosion on the plane, he said. “I can only say it was a miracle … we could have died if we had been late.”
