The John Griff column: When tragedy is on one side of a coin and a miracle is on the other…

That the 379 passengers and crew of Flight JL516 all survived the collision between their inbound Airbus A350 landing in darkness from Hokkaido in Northern Japan and a smaller coastguard plane at Haneda Airport serving the city of Tokyo, is nothing short of a miracle. The miracle is all the more noteworthy in view of the fact that all those on board also survived the catastrophic fire which consumed the airliner after it came to a standstill on the runway. In this instance, it seems that the crew of the Airbus had enough time to shepherd the entirety of their passengers to safety down the escape slides from what is a state-of-the-art airliner made from the very latest materials, including carbon-reinforced plastic. As the ferocity of the fire reduced the aircraft to a charred shell of its former self, it was easy to see the fuselage bulkheads and beams through the skin of the aircraft, thanks to video feeds which emerged as the drama unfolded and the flames tore through the cabin. Weakened by its intensity, the fuselage finally broke its back, giving way just aft of the landing gear and collapsing onto the tarmac. By then though, the passengers and crew had not only escaped the aircraft but had also been evacuated to a point a long way from what remained of it.

And yet, there was tragedy too.

Sitting adjacent to the runway as the Airbus approached, a smaller Bombardier Dash 8 coastguard plane, usually tasked with maritime surveillance, was waiting to take its turn on the runway and due to depart for the Noto area of Japan - itself the epicentre of the earthquake which had struck in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Carrying a crew of six, the Dash 8 was loaded with aid bound for the area. From the videos which showed the moment of impact and the fireball which erupted around the nose area of the Airbus immediately afterwards, speculation would have it that the Dash 8 might have rolled into the path of the descending Airbus, the nose gear of the airliner colliding with some part of the coastguard plane. The Dash 8 is a turboprop aircraft with its wings and tail mounted high up on its fuselage. What was it doing there, and what caused it to be on a collision path with the inbound, 230 tonne A350? Images of the Airbus after it came to a halt (see passenger William Manzione’s picture) showed a substantial impact to the nose of the aircraft, just below the cockpit floor. As it was, the Airbus hit the Dash 8 at roughly 160 miles per hour, presumably tearing it apart and tossing it aside as a huge fireball ignited. The collision killed five of the six crew and left only the captain alive, albeit with critical injuries (accurate at the time of writing, but subject to change). Already on the ground, the Airbus continued down the runway, braking hard as fire consumed the nosewheel undercarriage area at the front of the aircraft and sent flames up and into the low, wing mounted engines. Stopping quickly, the crew deployed the escape chutes and ushered the passengers down and away before making their own escapes. Meanwhile, fire took hold both outside the aircraft and inside its cabin, from whereon it was then lost.

Japan has, for many years been seen as a global leader in public transport safety both in the air and on the ground. Its training regimes and mass evacuation procedures have been hailed as some of the best anywhere and it would appear that in this instance those procedures again proved their worth, saving the lives of hundreds, albeit not without a great deal of good fortune. As it is, many questions now exist in addition to how the two aircraft could have collided in the first place.

Although it is purely speculation to suggest it, could the answer lie in the kind of flight that the Dash 8 had being tasked with carrying out? Here, London based Professor Alessio Patalano from King’s College was quoted by the BBC as saying that the airport’s air traffic handlers would have been trying to slot mercy and aid flights into what is a busy schedule for the Haneda airport, serving Tokyo as it does with anything up to five hundred flights daily. Carrying aid to the earthquake epicentre of Northern Japan, however urgently it was needed, would apparently not have given the Bombardier a priority departure slot, so was this a case of tragic urgency on behalf of the Dash 8 crew to get going which put them on the end of the runway just as the Airbus was landing above them? Was the Airbus wide of the centre line on its final approach and its crew unaware of the Dash 8 ahead and underneath them? Was there a missed radio message on either flight deck at a crucial moment? We simply won’t know until the reports of the aircrash investigation teams are compiled and released.

It seems strange to talk in terms of a miracle of good fortune when lives have been lost. For those affected directly by events in Northern Japan, the earthquake and its associated aftershocks have ushered 2024 in by bringing death and destruction with them and further tragic losses are still being confirmed in that country. And yet, there has indeed been a miracle in the safe evacuation of 379 people from what could so easily have been a much higher number of lost lives. This is the first time that an Airbus A350 has been destroyed in such a collision and yet the machine seems to have performed admirably in giving those on board the chance of life even as it was being consumed by fire itself. In a world of so much current calamity, it seems appropriate to be counting a few blessings, as those on board Flight JL516 and their families must be, right now.