Doomed Japan plane on third quake mission when runway disaster hit

TOKYO – A Japanese coast guard plane was making its third emergency trip to an earthquake zone within 24 hours when

it collided with a passenger jet

at a very busy Haneda Airport, a coast guard official told Reuters.

The official declined to be named due to an ongoing investigation into the runway crash between the De Havilland Dash-8 turboprop and a Japan Airlines (JAL) Airbus A350 passenger jet.

Five of the six crew members on board the coast guard plane died, but all 379 people on the JAL plane escaped.

Details of the coast guard plane’s movements before the collision have not previously been reported.

The surviving pilot is under scrutiny after the authorities released control tower transcripts appearing to show he was ordered to enter a holding area near the runway before the crash occurred.

He said he had permission to enter the runway where the JAL plane was landing, the coast guard said on Jan 3, although there was no indication of that in the transcripts.

It is unclear whether the volume of airport traffic or the emergency response to the earthquake that struck late afternoon on Jan 1, destroying thousands of homes and killing at least 84 people, were factors in the accident.

Aviation experts say airplane accidents usually involve multiple variables and the failure of several safety guardrails.

In the 24 hours before the collision, the coast guard aircraft had already made two round trips from Haneda to the quake zone.

The first of its trips was a 3 ½ hour survey of the area shortly after the 7.6-magnitude quake struck on Jan 1, followed by a flight carrying rescue workers that returned early on Jan 2, the official said.

Reuters verified the timings with flight tracking data on adsbexchange.com.

Tokyo Haneda is the world’s third-busiest airport, according to OAG, a travel industry data provider based in Britain.

Flight schedule data from Cirium analysed by Reuters showed that an average of 1,290 flights departed and arrived at Haneda daily in December.

On the day of the accident – a public holiday in Japan – the airport was at full capacity, said Mr Shigenori Hiraoka, director-general of the Civil Aviation Bureau.

It was no ordinary day for the coast guard either.

The doomed plane had returned early that morning with a different crew from a mission taking relief workers to an area devastated by the earthquake, the coast guard official told Reuters.

Thousands of rescue workers were scrambled to respond to the disaster.

Captain Genki Miyamoto, 39, and his crew were preparing to take the plane – one of four stationed at the coast guard base at Haneda – back to the earthquake zone loaded with food and water.

The aircraft arrived back at Haneda from its second mission at 2.30am local time and left the hangar of the base again at 4.45pm, the official said.

The collision occurred at 5.47pm, the authorities said.

In normal times, the coast guard tends to fly mid-morning when runways are less busy, the official said, adding the airport was “very busy” on the day of the accident.

Captain Miyamoto, the pilot, also had a busy schedule.

The day before, he had been on a seven-hour mission to Japan’s southernmost island Okinotori, where he had been surveying a Chinese vessel off its waters.

He returned around 5pm, just after the earthquake struck.

At that point, his mission the next day was not scheduled, the official said.

Captain Miyamoto suffered severe burns as a result of the crash and could not be reached for comment.

The official said he had been a captain for nearly five years and had clocked 3,641 hours of flight time.

The destroyed aircraft – JA722A – was the only Japan Coast Guard plane that was not destroyed when a 2011 tsunami hit Sendai Airport in north-east Japan, according to an official coast guard newsletter.

It suffered some water damage but was restored and returned to Haneda the following year. REUTERS