Heroes without cape: True to training, how cabin crew pulled out all pax from burning JAL plane

The passengers of Japan Airlines flight 516 were seated with their seat belts locked in when the aircraft touched the runway of Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on 2 January, 2024, but soon there was a chaos inside the cabin when they saw flames licking the windows and spreading faster than their imagination.

All clueless 367 passengers on board JAL Airbus A350 were praying for their lives and were patiently managed by 12 cabin crew members before being ushered to safety.

The attendants of the JAL flight that burst into flames on Tuesday hid their unease and followed every little detail of their safety training to disembark all passengers in less than 20 minutes.

What was happening inside JAL flight?

The JAL jet collided with a coast guard jet soon after landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Initially passengers saw spark on touching down of the plane but were petrified as they noticed the flight quickly engulfing into flames.

Confusion started to mount inside the flight with passengers becoming impatient, noticing that an engine had caught fire. The pilot had brought the aircraft to a halt on its nose.

The situation turned difficult after the crew were not being able to use the PA system which got damaged. They then calmly issued instructions through megaphones and were asked to evacuate through slides, leaving behind their carry-on luggage.

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In one of the videos, a woman passenger is heard shouting, “Please get me out of here."

“Why don’t you just open the doors?” a child was heard asking.

The ‘miracle’ happened

“It’s natural for passengers to start panicking when they see flames, and obviously there had been come sort of collision, which must have been extremely worrying for those on board," Michele Robson, a former air traffic controller, told Channel 4 News.

She also praised the crew, saying they had done “really well to evacuate under very difficult circumstances."

Crediting the crew for averting a bigger tragedy, Paul Hayes, director of air safety at the UK-based aviation consultancy Ascend by Cirium, said: “The cabin crew must have done an excellent job. There don’t seem to be any carry-ons. It was a miracle that all the passengers got off."

The cabin crew “did a remarkably great job” getting passengers off the plane so quickly, said John Cox, a pilot and founder of a US-based aviation safety consultancy.

“It shows good training,” Cox was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

“And if you look at the video, people are not trying to get stuff out of the overheads. They are concentrating on getting out of the airplane," he added.

How JAL cabin crew managed to safely evacuate all passengers?

In August 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 bound to Osaka crashed into a mountain shortly after take-off from Tokyo’s Haneda airport, killing 520 of the 524 people on board.

The cause of the crash was traced to a faulty repair carried out by Boeing engineers and not to pilot error.

To this day, it is the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history. It is almost four decades, but it helped turned Japan Airlines into a safe airline.

Japan Airlines is now regularly named as one of the world’s safest airlines by the website airlineratings.com.

Only this week, JAL was named among the world’s safest 25 airlines in an annual listing by website.

A report by BBC quoted a former flight attendant of Japan Airlines saying new crew members undergo stringent evacuation and rescue training for up to three weeks before they are allowed to serve in commercial flights.

Also, the training is repeated every year to ensure more safety to the fliers.

“We go through a written exam, case study discussions and practical training using different scenarios, such as when the plane has to make a water landing or if there is fire on board. Maintenance staff are also involved in such training,” the flight attendant, who left the company 10 years ago, was quoted as saying.

The report also quoted a pilot for Japan Airlines, speaking on the condition of anonymity, saying the rigorous training that the flight crew had undergone helped with the speedy evacuation.

“I think what happened in this case was that the training kicked in. You really don’t have time to think in a situation like this, so you just do what you were trained to do,” he said.

The pilot further informed that in order for any passenger aircraft to be internationally certified, the manufacturers must show that everyone aboard can deplane within 90 seconds. Evacuation tests sometimes involve actual passengers, he added.

In 2006, Japan Airlines opened a museum-like facility near Haneda displaying wreckage from the incident, with an aim to promote safety awareness among its employees.