STR
- New details are emerging about how 379 people safely evacuated a burning Japan Airlines plane.
- A key factor was that passengers listened to instructions and left their luggage behind.
- The plane collided with a coast guard aircraft while landing in Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
Nearly 400 people were able to evacuate a Japan Airlines plane that caught fire while landing in Tokyo partly because they listened to instructions to leave their luggage behind.
Japan Airlines Flight 516 collided with a coast guard plane on Tuesday while landing in Tokyo's Haneda airport. All 379 people on board were able to evacuate the plane before it became engulfed in flames.
Aviation experts have praised the efficiency of the plane's crew in organizing the evacuation under intense pressure, and passengers for listening to instructions.
Footage shows passengers, none apparently carrying luggage, leaving the plane down an inflatable slide.
"It shows good training," John Cox, an airline safety consultant, told The Associated Press. "And if you look at the video, people are not trying to get stuff out of the overheads. They are concentrating on getting out of the airplane."
A fire safety expert told the BBC that if passengers had tried to retrieve luggage it could have slowed the evacuation, with potentially deadly consequences.
"I don't see a single passenger on the ground, in any of the videos I've seen, that has got their luggage with them… If people tried to take their cabin luggage, that's really dangerous because they would slow down the evacuation," Prof. Ed Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich, told the outlet.
A passenger told Japan's NHK News that the flight crew remained calm during the emergency and instructed passengers not to take luggage.
Japan Airline's own in-flight safety video clearly instructs passengers not to retrieve luggage if there's an emergency. It also contains an animated sequence of a passenger blocking an aisle while trying to retrieve a bag from an overhead locker and then damaging an inflatable slide.
The crew managed to evacuate passengers down inflatable slides from the three usable emergency exits at the front of the plane in around 18 minutes, Japan Airlines said.
"I can only say it was a miracle, we could have died if we were late," passenger Tsubasa Sawada told Reuters.