The flight between the northern city of Sapporo and Tokyo's Haneda Airport is the busiest air route in Japan and one of the most frequent services worldwide. Japan Airlines (JAL) operates 16 roundtrip flights a day on that route.
But as JAL516 connecting the two cities arrived in Haneda on Tuesday, it ended up colliding on the runway with another Coast Guard plane and burst into flames. Twelve crew members were responsible for miraculously evacuating all 367 passengers in a matter of minutes after the crash thanks to their safety training and passenger discipline. However, five of the six crew members of the Coast Guard plane died.
The collision occurred almost instantly after landing at 5:46 p.m., the airline said. The captain had been given permission to land, but he likely couldn't see the Coast Guard's smaller Dash-8 maritime patrol plane, airline executives said at a late-night news conference.
After the crash, the captain of the Coast Guard plane, Genki Miyamoto, 39, climbed out of the wreckage and radioed his base. "The plane exploded on the runway. I escaped. The other crew members are unknown," he said, according to the Coast Guard. The other five crew members, aged between 27 and 56, died.
Meanwhile, on the JAL plane, the passenger cabin was rapidly beginning to fill with smoke as some passengers anxiously ran up and down the aisles and others clung to screaming children. "Please get me out of here," a distraught woman says in a video shared with Reuters from inside the plane. "Why don't they open (the doors)?" a child shouts.
According to the airline, flight attendants followed their safety training and took between 10 and 15 minutes to remove all passengers from the plane, including several children who were crying.
Some passengers have described these moments of anguish on social media and explained how the crew asked them to remain calm, stay in place and cover their nose and mouth so as not to inhale the smoke while they opened the emergency doors.
In some cases, oxygen masks were deployed and some passengers began to shout and ask to be let out, while others asked that the crew be heard and conveyed their instructions to those who were nearby.
"I really thought I was going to die," explains Tsubasa Sawada, 28, a Tokyo resident, who was returning from a vacation in Sapporo with his girlfriend. "After the accident happened, at first I laughed a little when I saw some sparks coming out (of the engine), but when the fire started, I realized it was something more."
Outside, 115 firefighting units were deployed to the scene to battle a fire that started in the rear of the plane and eventually engulfed the entire aircraft in a fireball.
"The smell of smoke was in the air and the doors wouldn't open. So I think everyone panicked," one passenger told Japanese broadcaster TBS. "It was hot inside the plane and I honestly thought I wouldn't survive," another survivor told NHK.
Yamake, who was sitting near the front, said that although some passengers were very nervous, the crew quickly deployed the evacuation slides and people began to disembark in an orderly manner.
The airline said the evacuation began almost immediately after the plane came to a stop and that all passengers were evacuated at 6:55 p.m., just over a quarter of an hour after the collision. According to international standards, all people on board an aircraft should be able to exit within 90 seconds under normal conditions.
The miraculous evacuation has been attributed to the emergency training of the crew, but also to the discipline of the passengers, in a country that is known for its respect for the rules and its consideration of the collective before the individual.
Video footage shows passengers being evacuated calmly, apparently without carry-on luggage. Air safety agencies have warned for years that pausing to collect carry-on luggage puts lives at risk during an evacuation.
"The cabin crew must have done an excellent job. There doesn't seem to be any hand luggage. It was a miracle that all the passengers got off," explains Paul Hayes, director of air safety at UK-based aviation consultancy Ascend. United.
A Japanese Transportation Ministry official said at a news conference that the airline's evacuation procedures were "properly carried out."
Satoshi Yamake, 59, says that about 10 minutes after leaving the plane there was an explosion. "I can only say that it was a miracle, we could have died if we had delayed," he said.
Terence Fan, an aviation expert at the Singapore Management University (SMU), interviewed by AFP, declared himself "somewhat surprised" by the success of the evacuation, "given that some doors could not be used" because of the flames. They advanced from behind.
"This was possible because the passengers appear to have followed the instructions in an exemplary manner, which allowed them and the crew to exit the plane in a short time, before the plane was completely engulfed in flames," Fan added.
Although the exact cause of the crash is still unknown, the JAL plane had been cleared to enter the runway, the company said. According to the Japanese state broadcaster NHK, the air traffic controller had given instructions to the Japan Coast Guard plane to go to a point before entering the runway, while other reports suggest that the captain of this ship had received permission to take off, so everything points to professional negligence.
