Transport safety officials are searched for a voice recorder from the severely burned fuselage of a Japan Airlines plane, seeking information on what caused a collision with a small coastguard plane on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda airport.
On Saturday, heavy machinery was working for a second day to remove debris of the burned Airbus A350 for storage in a hangar to allow the runway to reopen. Wreckage from the coastguard plane has already been cleared.
Transport minister Tetsuo Saito said officials were aiming to reopen the runway on Monday.
He said the airport’s traffic control operators will create a new position for monitoring aircraft movement on runways beginning on Saturday. There has been speculation that controllers might not have paid attention to the coastguard plane’s presence on the runway when they gave the JAL plane permission to land.
Experts from the Japan Transport Safety Board on Friday walked through the mangled debris of the Airbus A350-900 which remains on the runway.
They have secured the flight and voice data recorders from the coastguard’s Bombardier Dash-8 plane and a flight data recorder from the JAL jet to find out what happened in the last few minutes before Tuesday’s fatal collision.
All 379 occupants of JAL Flight 516 were safely evacuated within 18 minutes of landing as the aircraft was engulfed in flames.
The pilot of the coastguard plane also escaped but its five other crewmembers died. The aircraft was on a mission to deliver relief goods to survivors of powerful earthquakes in central Japan which killed at least 100 people.
NHK television reported that footage from its monitoring camera at the airport showed that the coastguard plane moved on to the runway and stopped for about 40 seconds before the collision.
In the footage, the coastguard aircraft enters the runway from the C5 taxiway, then shortly afterwards the passenger plane touches down right behind and rams into it, creating an orange fireball.
The JAL airliner, covered with flames and spewing grey smoke, continues down the runway before coming to a stop.
Transcript of recorded communication at traffic control, released by the transport ministry on Wednesday, showed that the controller told the coastguard plane to taxi to a holding position just before the runway, noting its number one departure priority.
The coastguard pilot repeats the instruction, then offers thanks for the top slot. There was no further instruction from control allowing the coastguard to enter the runway.
The pilot told police investigators his aircraft was struck just as he powered up the engines after obtaining clearance to take off.
The small lights on the coastguard aircraft and its 40-second stop might have made it less visible to the JAL pilots and air traffic control. NHK also said that control officials may have missed an alert system for unauthorised runway entry while engaging in other operations.
The JTSB investigators were aiming to interview seven JAL cabin attendants to get their accounts, after similar interviews with the three pilots and two other attendants.
A team from the aircraft manufacturer, Airbus, was also joining the investigation, a requirement under international aviation safety rules, according to the board.
Aviation safety authorities from France, home to Airbus’s main management, and Canada, where the maker of Bombardier planes is based, are to co-operate in the investigation.
Experts from the US National Transport Board were to provide help with A350’s Honeywell-made flight and voice data recorders.
