Japan Plane Collision: Video Showing How Passengers Calmly Evacuated Burning Jet Comes With a Lesson

The mere practice of ‘discipline’ emerged as a “key factor” influencing the pace of the evacuation, with the final person narrowly escaping just before Tokyo’s Haneda Airport runway was engulfed in flames, as stated by aviation experts. The collision of Japan Airlines Flight 516 with a Coast Guard plane upon landing transformed it into a fireball. Tragically, five of the six occupants of the smaller aircraft, originally intended for delivering aid to New Year’s Day earthquake victims, lost their lives. Conversely, everyone on Flight 516 survived, and the flawless cabin evacuation, along with the composed response from passengers amidst the smoke, garnered global admiration.

In widely circulated social media videos, one can observe how the panic-stricken passengers, without succumbing to anxiety, adhered to the crew’s instructions. This resulted in no casualties, ultimately showcasing the crew’s rigorous training in action and the cooperation of “well-behaved” passengers who strictly followed safety protocols.

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A video imparting last-minute emergency behaviour tips highlighted the Japanese passengers’ composed demeanour: they refrained from panicking, avoided opening overhead bins, attentively followed staff instructions, abstained from recording or photographing the burning plane, assisted each other on the emergency slide, and notably evacuated without their luggage – a decision lauded by experts as crucial for expediting the evacuation process.

Prof Ed Galea, director of the fire safety engineering group at the University of Greenwich in London, highlighted the absence of passengers with their luggage in the videos: “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,” he remarked to BBC.

While the cabin crew’s adept management of the crisis merits applause, it is the passengers’ conduct that has earned the internet’s admiration for their ‘adherence to rules.’

“That video of Japanese passengers sitting patiently while the plane is on fire, is mind boggling. Can only expect that kind of discipline from the Japanese. That trust on established processes even when the world is falling apart. No wonder not a single passenger was harmed,” commented one user on the social media platform ‘X’. Another chimed in, “Japanese culture means that everyone behaved and did exactly what they were meant to do.”

A Desi user contributed, “Japanese discipline again …. the rest of the world has so much to learn. The plane was burning and passengers are seated…”

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Another remarked, “Indians would have started collecting their luggage from overhead compartment. They would have dragged their 10kg bags on the ramp. Half would have been perished. Half would have saved themselves and their precious luggage.”

Meanwhile, as investigations into the Tokyo runway collision unfold, early transcripts from control tower conversations suggest that the coastguard plane had not been cleared for takeoff while the passenger plane had been granted permission to land.