How 379 people escaped deadly fire in a plane in Japan?

It took firefighters more than eight hours to extinguish the fire that engulfed a Japan Airlines jet after it struck another plane on landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Tuesday. It took 12 crew members just minutes to usher hundreds of people on board to safety.

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 landing and coming to a halt on its nose after its front landing gear failed.

“It was getting hot inside the plane, and I thought, to be honest, I would not survive,” one female 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.

Another passenger described surviving the crash as a “miracle”.

“I bounced off my seat from the impact when we landed,” the 28-year-old man told Nikkei Asia.

“We made it just in the nick of time. It’s a miracle we survived.”

Takuya Fujiwara from the Japan Transport Safety Board told reporters that the flight recorder and the voice recorder from the coast guard plane had been found, but those of the passenger jet were still being sought.

“We are surveying the situation. Various parts are scattered on the runway,” Fujiwara said, adding that the authority planned to interview several people involved.

Asked at a briefing whether the Japan Airlines flight had landing permission, officials at the major carrier said: “Our understanding is that it was given.”

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.

「早く出して」口々に叫ぶ子どもら　乗客が撮影したJAL機内の様子https://t.co/A0zwx0YG6v

脱出前の機内の映像です。
「（ドアを）開ければいいじゃないですか」と泣き叫ぶ子どもの悲痛な声も聞こえます。 pic.twitter.com/sRxrs3gOjd

— 朝日新聞デジタル (@asahicom) January 2, 2024

“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. 

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 from becoming a major disaster.

“I can’t speculate on what happened here but human error will probably be found as a contributing cause,” Doug Drury, aviation expert at Central Queensland University, told AFP.

“Airlines are required to be able to empty an airplane of all passengers and crew within 90 seconds. The flight crews train for events quite frequently in simulation and it is a complicated process that as we saw was completed without fail,” he said.