A Japan Airlines passenger jet and a coast guard plane collided on an airport runway in Tokyo on Tuesday, killing five of the six people on board the coast guard aircraft. The Airbus A350 went up in flames. But all 379 people on board, including 12 crew members, were able to escape
Japanese officials are still investigating the cause of the incident, but flight safety experts say the role of the flight crew, improvements in plane safety designs and — crucially — the way the passengers reacted would all have been key to helping them evacuate safely.
“I think the crew did a fabulous job,” Ed Galea, a professor and leader of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at London’s University of Greenwich, said in an interview Wednesday. He noted that the crew members were operating under particularly difficult conditions because the plane was nose-down on the tarmac, meaning that passengers leaving from the rear probably had to walk up a steep angle, while those using the front exits were walking down a slow.
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