Tokyo — At a crowded Haneda airport, a Coast Guard plane collided with a passenger jet on its third emergency flight to an earthquake zone in less than a day, a Coast Guard officer told Reuters.
Due to an ongoing investigation into the runway collision between a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 passenger plane and a De Havilland Dash-8 turboprop, the official declined to be named. Out of the 379 passengers on the JAL airliner, five of the six Coast Guard crew members perished.
There has never been a report on the Coast Guard plane’s movements prior to the crash.
Authorities have made control tower transcripts available, which seem to indicate that the Coast Guard crew’s surviving pilot was given the go-ahead to enter a holding area close to the runway prior to the crash. This has put the pilot under investigation.
READ: A plane crash in Tokyo airport claims five lives in Japan
The Coast Guard stated on Wednesday that he claimed to have clearance to enter the runway where the Japan Airlines (JAL) plane was landing, even though the transcripts made no mention of that.
It’s unclear if the disaster was caused in part by the volume of airport traffic or the emergency reaction to the late-afternoon January 1 earthquake, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 84 people.
A 3.5-hour assessment of the area shortly after the magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck on January 1 and a flight transporting rescue personnel that returned early on January 2 were the two round trips the Coast Guard aircraft had made from Haneda to the disaster zone in the 24 hours prior to the crash, the official said.
Reuters used flight tracking information from adsbexchange.com to confirm the timings.
According to aviation experts, airplane accidents typically entail a number of factors as well as the failure of many safety precautions.
