Passengers expressed their relief and recalled tense moments following their narrow escape from a Japan Airlines jet that caught fire after colliding with a Japan Coast Guard airplane at Tokyo's Haneda airport Tuesday.
"Let us go now!" a child screamed from the jet's cabin, where smoke and heat were spreading quickly. Passengers escaped from the aircraft using evacuation slides, as fire engulfed the aircraft soon after it arrived at the airport on the evening of a New Year national holiday.
"I felt a bump, like the aircraft was colliding with something when touching down. I saw a spark outside the window and the cabin was filled with gas and smoke," said a 35-year-old woman who was in a window seat when the accident took place shortly before 6 p.m.
"We were instructed to bend down and cover our mouths and noses. Even after (the aircraft) started burning we could not get out of the plane quickly, and I felt like it took more than five minutes before we escaped," she said at a terminal after she got to safety, her voice quavering at times.
The blaze engulfed the Airbus A350 jetliner, which had just landed at Haneda airport from Sapporo in northern Japan. All 379 on board the commercial flight escaped without life-threatening injuries, while five of the six coast guard members on board the other aircraft died.
"I thought it was going to be dangerous" as the smoke continued to get worse after the fire broke out, said a 33-year-old man who was aboard the flight with his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
With an in-flight announcement calling on passengers to keep calm, the man, desperate to protect his daughter, kept her head close to the floor so that she would not breathe in the smoke, and the couple encouraged each other by saying, "Everything will be alright."
"We were relieved to be alive," he said.
His 29-year-old wife said everyone panicked when they saw the flames. "The smoke was so bad that we could only see our feet after flight attendants shone lights. Some were breathing with difficulty," she said, adding that other children were crying and screaming.
A flame that was initially seen at the rear of the aircraft's cabin spread quickly and engulfed the entire plane. Flames erupted from the windows and the doors, and firefighters attempted to put the fire out amid the sound of sirens.
The aircraft burnt down in an hour.
"It was getting hotter and hotter in the cabin and I thought I could not survive," a dentist in her 40s said. After escaping, she and other passengers called out to each other that it was good that their lives had been saved, she said.
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