Miracle escape as burning plane lands at Tokyo airport after collision

“The root cause of this accident is not known yet,” Transport Minister Tetsuo Saito said, adding that the country’s transport safety board and other agencies would work to determine what had happened.

Video aired by NHK shows a fireball streaking across the tarmac as the plane touched down.

As frightening as that looked from outside the plane, it was even scarier inside, said Anton Deibe, a 17-year-old Swede who was on the plane with his family.

He told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that his family did not understand exactly what was happening or the announcements, which he said were in Japanese.

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

Anton added: “The smoke in the cabin stung like hell.” He said that once they got out of the plane, he and his family had run out onto the field.

“It was chaotic. We are all completely in shock. I don’t think we understood what had happened.”

The family later said they were doing well.

The Kyodo News agency quoted a passenger who described feeling as if the plane had hit something before it then jerked upwards. The passenger, who was not identified, then told of seeing sparks outside the window and the cabin filling with smoke.

Japan Airlines said the plane had left New Chitose Airport in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido at 4.15pm (6.15pm AEDT) and was scheduled to land at Haneda at 5.35 pm, but landed at 5.47. An official said the Coast Guard aircraft had started taxiing to the runway about 4.45pm, about an hour before the collision.

The airline said the two planes collided and that both aircraft caught fire.

The airline added that according to interviews with the operating crew, the pilots “acknowledged and repeated the landing permission from air traffic control”, and then proceeded with the approach.

Japan Airlines said the cause of the accident was still under investigation and it was co-operating with officials.

Live footage after 6pm showed firefighters trying to douse flames pouring out of the aircraft, an Airbus A350-900. Video showed the passengers using the evacuation slides to exit. According to Japan Airlines, the aircraft’s announcement system malfunctioned during the evacuation, so the crew used a megaphone and their voices.

The Coast Guard plane involved in the collision was a fixed-wing MA722, according to a coast guard representative.

Japan Airlines drew praise for being able to safely evacuate 367 passengers under what was likely to have been enormous pressure.

Footage of the accident showed flames coming out the windows of the collapsed plane, making it seem impossible that everyone made it out safely.

Ed Galea, a professor and director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich in Britain, called the Japan Airlines 350 evacuation “a miraculous job”.

When the plane came to a stop, the nose gear collapsed, pitching the aircraft nose down with its tail up. Professor Galea said the footage showed passengers were evacuated from two of the exits at the front of the plane, and one exit at the back. Some of the passengers “essentially had to climb a hill in smoke”, he said.

“A cabin crew [member] stood at the back waving a torch, urging them to come forward.”

Maggie Kuwasaki, a Japan Airlines spokeswoman, said crews were trained to evacuate all passengers within 90 seconds. She said the crew was able to confirm that all passengers had evacuated by 6.05pm.

Trisha Ferguson, CEO of the Interaction Group, a company that designs airplane safety cards, said the fact that all passengers had managed to safely disembark demonstrated co-operation between passengers and staff.

“The crew was spectacular in their reaction times,” she said. “What they did was amazing.”

As part of safety testing of new airplanes, airlines must demonstrate that all passengers can be evacuated in 90 seconds. In the 1970s and 1980s, emergency training was mainly focused on the crew, Ms Ferguson said, but in the 1990s and 2000s, new emphasis was placed on educating passengers how to react in emergencies.

Yoshio Seguchi, deputy director of the Japanese Coast Guard, apologised for the crash but also offered few details about the cause of the accident.

Mr Kishida said of the Coast Guard crew: “They were filled with a determined sense of mission, and it is extremely regrettable and distressing what has happened to them.”

He expressed his “profound condolences to their surviving families”.

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