Any air transportation fatality is tragic, and our sympathy is extended to the loved ones of the five crew members of the Japan Coast Guard plane who died in a collision with Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight 516 on Tuesday Jan. 2. But considering that the JAL Airbus 350 had 367 passengers and 12 crew members on board, and every single one of them survived, this accident could have been so much worse.
Investigation of the crash will continue for months, but initially it appears that while the JAL flight was cleared to land on runway 34R at Haneda Airport, one of the two international airports in Tokyo, a much smaller Japan Coast Guard De Havilland turboprop was supposed to be waiting to enter the runway. However, possibly due to a misunderstanding or communications error, the De Havilland was already on the runway as the JAL aircraft was landing.
The two aircraft collided, killing five of the six crew members on the Coast Guard plane and sending the Airbus 350 skidding down the runway. It eventually ground to a stop with the right engine still running. Dramatic video footage of the wreck shows passengers escaping down inflatable ramps in the red glow of the engine's fiery exhaust.
The JAL flight crew were unable to use the plane's PA system, so they resorted to megaphones in order to direct the passengers to usable exits amid the smoke that quickly filled the cabin. The wide-body carbon-fiber-composite A350 was designed for quick evacuation, but until now the evacuation procedure had only been tried out in drills. Eyewitnesses say none of the passengers appeared to be carrying luggage, which probably helped evacuate the plane quickly. The plane's captain was the last person to leave the aircraft. Despite the presence of over 100 fire trucks and the efforts of firefighters, the A350's fire spread throughout the plane and completely destroyed it. But other than bruises and minor injuries, all the passengers and crews made it out safely.
According to a BBC report on the crash, after a 1985 accident in which a JAL aircraft collided with a mountain and killed 520 people the company pledged that they would "never again allow such a tragic accident to occur." And a look at commercial aircraft fatalities over the years shows a generally declining trend since the 1970s, with a low of 59 deaths worldwide in 2017, for example.
This is the first total loss of a carbon-fiber-airframe A350, and the Airbus designers should be justifiably proud of the way the plane took the punishment of a crash landing without coming apart. Carbon does burn, after all, while aluminum doesn't burn as easily, and one might be concerned that a carbon-fiber plane would be more dangerous in terms of flammability. But the JAL 516 crash proved that under the particular circumstances of this accident, the Airbus managed to protect every human being inside from a fiery death.
Turning to the causes of the crash itself, increasing aspects of commercial flying have been computerized and automated. But the processes of taxiing, takeoff, and landing are mostly still done manually by the pilots and copilots.
Decades ago, railroads devised a system called "interlock" which helps prevent settings of switches that would put a train on a track occupied by another train. Planes aren't trains, but it seems that with modern GPS systems installed on every commercial plane, some sort of coordinated alarm process could be designed to inform pilots when they are straying onto a runway that they have not yet been authorized to enter.
Of course, such a system could cause more trouble than it's worth. And cockpits are already overflowing with alarms, flashing indicators, and other distractions that sometimes encumber pilots more than helping them.
But when you look into any multiple-fatality accident, regardless of the engineering field, you will typically find that there were precursors: less serious non-fatal incidents that nevertheless resembled the big awful one, but for some reason turned out to be either harmless or only slightly harmful. These near-misses are full of information about how to avoid the big awful accident, if only engineers and safety people will pay attention to them.
In the JAL-Coast Guard plane crash, five people died, but that was only a small fraction of the number who could have perished, had it not been for the excellent safety procedures and obedience of the passengers who evacuated Flight 516 so quickly. So in terms of what could have happened, this crash was more of a warning than a full-fledged tragedy.
If the cause does turn out to be due to pilot error, I think it's time to consider some sort of automated system that at a minimum, warns a pilot when he is about to stray onto a runway for which he hasn't been authorized. Not being a commercial pilot, I may be speaking out of ignorance and there may be such a system in place already. But it seems like if there was, we would have heard about it. Warning systems can only do so much, but if a light or voice had warned the Japan Coast Guard pilot that he didn't belong on the runway yet, his crew members might not have died, and 379 other people might not have had to run for their lives before their plane burned up.
It's good to know that those inflatable ramps are actually good for something, and that the practice evacuations in aircraft manufacturers' test facilities that some people make fun of ("Sure, try doing that with smoke in the cabin and screaming people everywhere") can actually be realized in a real-life emergency. But what would be even better is if this accident encourages new safety features that would keep the precipitating cause from happening anywhere, ever again.
Sources: I thank my wife for alerting me to the BBC article on this crash at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67870119. I also referred to statistics at https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/
and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers, and the Wikipedia article "2024 Haneda airport runway collision."
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