A large passenger plane and a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft collided on runway at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Tuesday and burst into flames, killing five people.
All 379 people on Japan Airlines flight JAL-516 got out safely before the Airbus A350 was fully engulfed in flames, Transport Minister Tetsuo Saito confirmed.
The pilot of the Coast Guard's Bombardier Dash-8 plane escaped but the five crew members died, Saito said. The aircraft was preparing to take off to deliver aid to an area affected by a major earthquake on Monday, officials said.
Television footage showed an orange fireball erupting from the Japan Airlines plane as it collided while landing, and the airliner then spewed smoke from its side as it continued down the runway. Within 20 minutes, all passengers and crew members slid down emergency chutes to get away.
As firefighters tried to put out the blaze with streams of water, the area around the passenger plane's wing caught fire. The flames spread throughout the plane, which eventually collapsed. The fire was extinguished after about six hours.
Tuesday's accident was the first severe damage to an Airbus A350, among the industry's newest large passenger planes. It entered commercial service in 2015. Airbus said in a statement it was sending specialists to help Japanese and French officials investigating the accident, and that the plane was delivered to Japan Airlines in late 2021.
The A350 had flown from the Shin Chitose airport near the city of Sapporo, the transport minister said.
The fire is likely to be seen as a key test case for airplane fuselages made from carbon-composite fibres, such as the A350 and the Boeing 787, instead of conventional aluminum skins.
JAL Managing Executive Officer Tadayuki Tsutsumi told a news conference late on Tuesday that the A350 was making a "normal entry and landing" on the runway, without specifying how it collided with the coast guard plane.
Shigenori Hiraoka, head of the Transport Ministry Civil Aviation Bureau, said the collision occurred when the JAL plane landed on one of Haneda's four runways where the coast guard aircraft was preparing to take off. Transport safety officials were analysing communication between aviation control officials and the two aircraft and planned to interview JAL officials to determine what led to the collision.
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