Crews begin clearing plane wreckage from Japan runway collision

In footage from Japanese broadcaster TBS on Friday, crews at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport began removing the burnt wreckage of a Japan Airlines (JAL) aircraft off a runway as investigators looked for more hints as to what caused the fatal accident. On Tuesday, upon landing in Tokyo, the JAL Airbus A350 struck a Japanese Coast Guard turboprop on the runway. Five of the six crew members aboard the Coast Guard boat perished, while all 379 passengers on the JAL flight managed to leave before it caught fire. According to a representative of the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB), the JAL plane’s cockpit voice recorder has not yet been located. According to the official, the flight data recorder of the drone was recovered on Wednesday. According to the TBS story, officials plan to remove the wreckage by January 7th, at which point they will disassemble the aircraft and transfer it to its hangar for an inspection by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. According to TBS, crews started removing the Coast Guard aircraft on Thursday. Authorities investigating transportation are looking into what caused the Coast Guard aircraft to cross the runway used for the passenger jet landing. When the Coast Guard plane crashed with a passenger jet at a highly busy airport, it was on its third emergency flight to an earthquake zone in less than twenty-four hours, a Coast Guard officer told Reuters. Authorities have only just begun their investigations and aviation experts say it usually takes the failure of multiple safety guardrails for an airplane accident to happen. US aviation safety officials will provide assistance to Japan in the reading of airplane recorders the deadly collision, according to the head of the main US transport regulator. The runway collision marked the first time a modern lightweight airliner has burnt down and is being seen as a test case for how well a new generation of carbon-composite airplanes copes with a catastrophic fire.