TOKYO: Japanese investigators on Wednesday probed a collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport of a coast guard plane and a passenger jet that killed five people, with almost 400 others narrowly escaping a raging inferno.
All but one of the six people on the smaller aircraft were killed, but all 379 Japan Airlines passengers and crew escaped down emergency slides minutes before the Airbus was engulfed in flames late Tuesday.
The blackened husk of the airliner, still sitting on the tarmac Wednesday, bore witness to just how dangerous their escape had been. Several hundred metres (yards) away lay the remains of the coast guard’s DHC-8 aircraft.
The captain of the coast guard plane — which had been bound for the New Year’s Day earthquake zone in central Japan — was its lone survivor but suffered serious injuries.
Footage on Tuesday showed a ball of fire erupting from underneath the airliner shortly after it landed and came to a halt on its nose when its front landing gear failed.
As people slid to safety, dozens of fire engines with blue and red flashing lights sprayed the flames, but the entire fuselage was soon ablaze. It took eight hours to finally extinguish the fire.
“It was getting hot inside the plane, and I thought, to be honest, I would not survive,” one passenger told broadcaster NHK.
“I thought we landed normally. But then I realised I was smelling smoke,” a woman with a small child told NHK. “I needed to protect my daughter. That was the only thing in my mind,” she added.
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