On January 2nd, 2024 Japan Airlines flight 516 and a Japanese Coast Guard plane collided while landing at Haneda Airport. A devastating crash, thankfully everyone on Flight 516 survived unfortunately only one of the six Coast Guard members survived. Why did this happen?

  When an airplane wants to land it must contact ATC (Air Traffic Control instructs the planes who get to land, takeoff, taxi, and exit the gate, so no one has a collision). After contacting ATC they will request clearance to land at the airport if they are cleared they will land at a specific runway or if they are told to wait they would circle the airport. For a plane to take off they first must taxi to the runway after receiving clearance. Then they will wait before getting onto the runway and when the runway is cleared they will be allowed to line up in the middle and take off.

Japan Airlines flight 516 according to the black box (A small box in the cockpit that records the audio in the cockpit) and air traffic control chatter was given clearance to land on runway 34R. Also, JA722A (the coast guard plane) was given clearance to line up and wait on the runway. After sitting there for about 43 seconds before the collision. This is where JAL516 (Japan Airlines Flight 516) is unable to pull up and hits JA722A. This causes an explosion and a huge fire instantly destroys the small Bombardier-8(Coast Guard Plane). The huge Airbus A350(JAL516) also catches fire but isn’t instantly crushed. 

Since they both received clearance from ATC. It was ATC’s fault for the crash if they had given JA722A clearance for takeoff sooner or given JAL516 orders to do a go-around (when the plane aborts the landing and circles back around the airport to land again). Surprisingly as of now, ATC has not received any punishment. Thankfully this is a relatively rare occurrence and flying is still very safe.