Hundreds of Passengers Survived Fiery Japan Airlines Crash — A Similar 1977 Accident Was Far More Fatal

A fiery collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport between a passenger plane and a coast guard aircraft left five people dead Tuesday — but has been hailed as a “miracle” after all 379 people on board the Japan Airlines flight survived.

It was reminiscent of the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, when two planes crashed at Los Rodeos Airport in the Canary Islands.

Tuesday’s accident happened after a Japanese Airlines Airbus A-350 landed on a runway and collided with the Coast Guard plane that was readying to take off. Only one of the six people on the small military plane, the pilot, survived.

The 1977 crash, which was the single-deadliest accident in aviation history, killing 583 people, was also between two planes on a runway.

It occurred when KLM Flight 4805 began taking off while Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. All 248 people on board the KLM flight died along with 335 passengers and crew on the Pan Am flight. Sixty-one people on the Pan Am flight survived.

That accident, which happened as dense fog blanketed the runway, was a result of miscommunication. How the Japan Airlines crash happened is currently being investigated.

Jon Ziomek, who wrote a book called "Collision on Tenerife: The How and Why of the World's Worst Aviation Disaster,” said it often boils down to “the question is who had the permission to be where they were.”

“Sometimes it just comes back to simple human error,” he said.

Safety technology has improved since the 1977 crash, but the reason that so many lives were spared in the crash Tuesday is likely because it didn’t share many of the factors that made the Tenerife crash so deadly.

That crash, Ziomek said, was between two 747s, instead of one giant and one small like Tuesday’s crash. 

Tuesday’s crash being less deadly "could be as simple as a big plane hitting a much much smaller plane,” Ziomek said.

In 1977, the KLM plane in Tenerife had also just refueled, meaning it was a massive bomb on impact, Ziomek said. The Japan Airlines plane had crashed after landing, and likely had much less fuel. And both the KLM plane and the Pam Am flight were very full of passengers, Ziomek said.

Investigators from Japan and on behalf of Airbus are in the process of investigating the Tokyo crash. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said "the root cause of this accident is not known yet."