Transcripts of communications between the control tower at Tokyo’s Haneda airport and two aircraft involved in a deadly crash on Tuesday night suggest that a Japan Coast Guard plane had not been cleared for take-off before it collided with a passenger jet on the runway.
The transcript, which was released by the Japanese government late on Wednesday, covers just over four minutes of exchanges ahead of the crash, which left five people dead and forced nearly 400 to make an emergency evacuation from a burning Japan Airlines plane.
The JCG aircraft — a De Havilland Dash-8 coastguard turboprop that was due to fly emergency earthquake relief supplies to western Japan — entered the runway just as a JAL Airbus A350 from Sapporo was landing. The planes collided, causing an accident in which five of the six-member coastguard crew were killed.