Editor’s Note: Les Abend was a Boeing 777 captain for American Airlines, retiring after 34 years with the airline. He is a CNN aviation analyst and senior contributor to Flying magazine. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
The fiery collision between a Japan Airlines Airbus 350-900 and a Japanese coast guard aircraft on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport was a disaster that could have been a much bigger tragedy.
All 379 people on Tuesday’s JAL 516 Flight were safely evacuated. Unfortunately, five crew members aboard the coast guard’s De Havilland Canada DHC-8 perished. That plane’s captain was in critical condition, according to public broadcaster NHK.
On a positive note, credit is due the cockpit and cabin crew aboard the JAL flight. It is textbook training for flight attendants to be prepared for a possible evacuation on every takeoff and landing. They are triggered to leap from their jump seats and make an immediate determination of safe exits for passengers to escape. That’s why flight attendants want passengers off their phones and computers on takeoff and landing, so that they are situationally aware in the unlikely event of such circumstances.
A fire may render a particular door or emergency window exit unusable. It’s obvious that the flight attendants picked the correct exits to evacuate the A-350 since everyone survived. And it would appear the pilots did their best to accomplish their evacuation checklist, which includes shutting off the fuel to the engines.
How could this accident have occurred? We won’t know for sure until an investigation is completed. Although it’s speculation at the moment, this crash reminds me of a similar circumstance that occurred in 1991 at Los Angeles International Airport. A USAir Boeing 737-300 collided on the runway with a SkyWest commuter plane, a Swearingen Metroliner turboprop, killing more than 30 people.
It was a busy day at the Los Angeles airport. Airplane surface movements on the runways and taxiways got complicated enough such that the air traffic controller lost track of the fact that she still had the Metroliner holding in position on the runway in anticipation of its takeoff. Meanwhile, the controller had cleared the B-737 to land on the same runway.
As it was landing in the darkness, the USAir crew could not make out the silhouette or navigation lights of the small SkyWest airplane that was in position at a runway intersection. The B-737 collided with the Metroliner almost immediately after touchdown.
This accident was the catalyst for a series of procedural and technological changes. One example of a change was to prohibit controllers from taxiing an airplane onto a runway for takeoff at night or during low visibility weather.
Although the Los Angeles accident occurred in the United States, most of the aviation world took note. Pilots have become hypersensitive to remaining on an active runway waiting for takeoff clearance longer than a minute. And controllers have become hypersensitive to procedures that involve clearing an airplane to land with an airplane on the same runway awaiting takeoff.
Haneda Airport is one of the busiest in the world with nonstop radio chatter, and it’s possible a traffic controller’s message was misunderstood and one of the planes was in the wrong place. Normally, a clearance is read back and acknowledged by a pilot, but on busy transmission occasions there might not be an opportunity to immediately provide feedback. Sometimes a transmission gets blocked by another airplane at a critical time, which makes it important for both pilots and controllers to be situationally aware. Only one transmission can happen at a time.
Another scenario is that the pilots of the Airbus A-350 lined up for the wrong parallel runway. I find that less likely because at least one pilot in the cockpit should have caught the error, notwithstanding that the air traffic controller would have noticed.
Additionally, procedures in Japan are virtually the same as in the US; air traffic controllers are very competent and regimented. Out of all the international destinations to which I flew, Japan was one of the safest.
No doubt, the investigation into the Haneda Airport accident will reveal the missteps that led to the collision. To be certain, many factors will be involved. Somewhere within those factors will be a human element. We’ll need to give the accident investigators time to reach a likely probable cause or causes, with the objective of preventing such tragedies in the future.
Flying to Tokyo? Don’t hesitate to board the airplane. I would.