Five killed and more than a dozen injured in fiery plane crash in Japanese capital

Five people were killed and more than a dozen injured when a passenger jet collided with a Japanese coastguard aircraft as it landed at a Tokyo airport and burst into flames.

The coastguard plane was carrying aid for victims of the earthquake that rocked the country on New Year’s Day and has killed at least 48 people.

Footage from within the Japan Airlines Airbus-A350, which was carrying 379 people, including eight children, showed smoke pouring from beneath the wings of the plane as it landed at Tokyo’s Haneda airport at around 5.45pm local time (8.45am GMT).

By the time the plane came to a standstill, it was engulfed by flames and authorities were rushing to evacuate all passengers.

(via REUTERS)

It appears the plane, which had flown from Shin Chitose further north, crashed into a Japanese coastguard vessel that had taxied to the runway about an hour before the collision but had not taken off, according to Yoshio Seguchi, the deputy director of the Japan Coast Guard.

All five crew members were killed in the ensuing collision. The pilot, meanwhile, is in serious condition.

Aviation experts cautioned that a stationary plane hit by a moving vessel is likely to sustain the majority of the damage but some in the commercial flight were also injured.

Transport minister Tetsuo Saito said the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB), police and other departments would continue to investigate the crash.

Broadcaster NHK, citing the Tokyo Fire Department, said at least 17 of the people evacuated from the passenger plane were injured.

A passenger on board the flight described the moment their plane appeared to have collided with the other aircraft.

(AP)

“I felt a boom,” the unnamed passenger told Kyodo news agency, “like we had hit something and jerked upward the moment we landed. I saw sparks outside the window and the cabin filled with gas and smoke.”

Teenager Anton Deibe, 17, who was travelling on the flight with his sister and parents, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that the cabin then filled with smoke as it came to a stop.

“The entire cabin was filled with smoke within a few minutes,” he said. “We threw ourselves down on the floor. Then the emergency doors were opened and we threw ourselves at them.

“The smoke in the cabin stung like hell. It was hell. We have no idea where we are going so we just run out into the field. It was chaos.”

Miraculously, all 379 passengers, including 12 crew members, survived without life-threatening injuries, the local authorities announced.

But what originally seemed to be a success story quickly turned into yet another fatal tragedy in Japan in 2024 as it emerged five unaccounted-for coastguard crew members had died in the crash.

Prime minister Fumio Kishida expressed his condolences to the families of the five killed, praising their efforts to bring aid to those suffering from the earthquake a couple of hundred miles away from the capital.

“They were filled with a determined sense of mission, and it is extremely regrettable and distressing what has happened to them,” he said of the crew. “I express my profound condolences to the surviving families”.

In a nod to the unforeseen difficulties of the new year, he added that the disaster would not affect relief efforts for earthquake victims.

Some flights had resumed leaving Haneda airport after several hours of battling the fire.