All 379 passengers and crew on JAL’s Airbus A350 escaped as the airliner burned following the collision, which caused the front landing gear to collapse during touchdown. Five of the six people onboard the coastguard aircraft, which had been preparing to take off, were killed.
JAL said: “According to interviews with the operating crew, they acknowledged and repeated the landing permission from air traffic control and then proceeded with the approach and landing procedures.”
Reports from Japan centre on a dispute between transport officials, who say the coastguard aircraft was told to hold before entering the runway and the coastguard itself, which says the aircraft was given clearance to take off.
The investigation will hear evidence from the captain of the coastguard flight, the only survivor onboard the DHC-8 propellor aircraft. The crew had been preparing to fly supplies to areas affected by the magnitude 7.6 earthquake, which struck central areas of Japan on New Year’s Day.
The JAL flight was inbound from Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido, a flying time of around 90 minutes. The miraculous escape of all onboard has been attributed, in part, to the small fuel load the wide-body Airbus – which can fly well in excess of 15 hours – was carrying.
A swift and orderly evacuation of passengers, who obeyed commands to leave their hand luggage behind, was also a factor.
The Airbus, which was delivered to JAL in November 2021, is the latest model and around half of it is made of carbon composite. Safety officials will be examining footage of the accident to determine how the material burned, as this is thought to be the first such incident involving an aircraft of this construction type.
Dr Sonya Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales, told the Guardian the materials “lose their structural capability, their sense of thickness, at a lower temperature than aluminium” but added the fire was so intense, composites “weren’t going to change the overall outcome of this”.
Airbus said it had dispatched a team of specialists to assist authorities in Tokyo, adding: “The exact circumstances of the event are still unknown.”
