After landing, smoke filled the cabin and flames licked the windows, but the Japan Airlines crew got all 367 passengers safely off the aircraft in an orderly fashion — and just in time.
Panic-stricken passengers begged to be let off, footage from the scene on Tuesday at Tokyo International Airport showed.
“Honestly, I thought we wouldn’t survive. So I texted my family and friends to say that my plane is burning, right now,” a woman told broadcaster NHK.
Photo: AFP
After arriving from Hokkaido in the north, the Japan Airlines Airbus collided with a Japanese coast guard plane and caught fire as it sped down the runway.
It careened to a halt after the front landing gear failed, but all passengers and crew escaped down two emergency slides before the plane was engulfed in flames.
The smaller coast guard vessel was heading to deliver aid to earthquake-hit central Japan. Five of the six personnel died. Those on board Japan Airlines plane feared that could have been their fate.
“It felt like we abruptly hit something. Then the fire started, like: ‘Bang,’” a male passenger told broadcaster TBS.
“The smell of smoke was in the air, and the doors were not opening. So I think everyone panicked,” a female passenger said.
Eight children were on board the passenger plane. In one video clip, a young voice can be heard shouting: “Please let us out. Please. Please open it. Just open it. Oh, god.”
The plane landed at 5:46pm and everyone was off just under 20 minutes later, Japan Airlines told a briefing on Tuesday night.
Aviation experts said it was a carefully rehearsed and executed evacuation that stopped the plane from turning into a death trap.
“Passengers seemed to have followed instructions in a textbook manner,” said Terence Fan, an airline industry expert from Singapore Management University, with others praising those on board for leaving their cabin bags behind. “This is exactly what evacuation policies are designed for — the airframe itself is not meant to survive the blaze, ultimately.”
David Kaminski-Morrow, air transport editor at aviation news Web site FlightGlobal said: “I wouldn’t personally call the successful evacuation of the JAL [Japan Airlines] flight a ‘lucky escape’, although the passengers might believe so.”
Instead, he added, an efficient evacuation showed “what can be achieved by evacuating promptly and efficiently.”
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