The Japanese Coast Guard aircraft that was rammed by a Japan Airlines Boeing at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Tuesday lacked permission to take off and should not have been on the runway, according to initial conclusions drawn from communications that appear to contradict the surviving pilot's initial account.

A source at the Ministry of Transport confirmed that the airfield's air traffic controller cleared the Japan Airlines (JAL) Airbus A350 to land on runway C and ordered the Coast Guard plane to stay close to it. However, a Coast Guard source claimed that its pilot had been given the green light to take off. Still, Japan's Transportation Safety Board launched a full-scale investigation on Wednesday and officials plan to interview the captains of both planes.

Japan Airlines maintains that its plane proceeded with the landing after confirming the procedure with the control tower and without any record of any mishap on the runway, where in fact there was a second, smaller aircraft that had been mobilized for relief efforts after the powerful earthquake that shook the country on New Year's Day. reports the Kyodo news agency.

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The conversations recovered after the accident also show an order from the control tower for the plane to wait at a waiting point, off the runway. The crew responds affirmatively to this order, although it is unclear whether the voice in the recording is that of the sole survivor or that of his co-pilot, who died as a victim of the crash.

The authorities do not rule out that there may have been other interactions or even that the crew could have misinterpreted the instructions, which nevertheless seem clear.

The commercial airliner crashed at 17:47 p.m. local time in Japan on Tuesday when it collided with a Coast Guard DHC-8 aircraft on landing at Haneda International Airport. All 367 passengers and 12 crew members of the JAL plane were evacuated from the plane, while five of the six people on board the DHC-8 have died.

The crash forced the closure of all four runways at Japan's busiest airport, but all but the one where the collision occurred were reopened later Tuesday after many flights were canceled.

  • Japan
  • Airbus
  • Boeing
  • Plane Crashes