45 seconds is probably just long enough to go ok let me ask the tower what’s up, especially if they were only aware of JAL166 coming in on a long final, and unaware of JAL516’s immediately pending touchdown just behind them, as is appearing to be the case.
If everyone needs to get off in a real emergency, the window exits are potentially usable too, but the passengers there would need to use the flaps to slide down, a more iffy proposition than the slides.
That seems to me a very long time to say nothing when you do know a heavy aircraft is bearing down on you and being told to slow to minimum approach speed. Unless there’s something missing in the transcript, the frequency was not congested, there’s clear air before and after the Tower controller giving instructions to JAL166 to slow down. And if JA722A right seat had looked at the approach before entering the runway, he would presumably have misidentified JAL516 as JAL166 and thought JAL166 was as close as JAL516 actually was.
IIRC the engines were still running. The damage to the aircraft did not allow for them to be shutdown. That also limited where passengers could safely get off the plane.
The Wall Street Journal article I cited says they used two forward slides and one rear slide.
In the second half of the video I linked to in post #6, it does look like the starboard engine (the core at least, maybe not the bypass fan) is still running, blowing sparks aft despite no obvious ambient wind.
I watched video of them exiting from the rear slide. It was the left and right forwardmost slides and one of the rear left slides. It was quite steep given that the aircraft was pitched far forward due to having collapsed nose gear.
I think it’s quite likely the RHS didn’t look, or if he did he looked but did not “see”. Otherwise they definitely would not have just waited on the runway that long.
Something else I just noticed in the transcript is that although JA722A does not hear the controller give JAL516 clearance to land or hear any transmission from JAL516, he does hear the controller tell JAL166 to slow down to space for a departure and that he is Number 2 to land, i.e. another landing aircraft is ahead of JAL166.
It’s always unambiguous that Number 1, Number 2 etc. refers to your position in the sequence of either landing or departing aircraft as appropriate, not the overall sequence of runway usage when the runway is being used for both. But perhaps a tired crew made the “Number 1” that they heard for themselves and the “Number 2” that they heard for JAL166 fit their incorrect preconception of what was happening. I wonder what we will find out about the state of mind of the JA722A crew - perhaps they were exhausted from operations connected to the earthquake.
Wow, seriously? I heard a journalist on NPR last night mention how good it was that the passengers were evacuated in “under 20 minutes”. I assumed she misspoke and intended to say “under 2 minutes”, given that the requirement is 90 seconds. But now I think maybe that was what she meant to say, although nearly 20 minutes to evacuate is very not good.
The information that’s coming out appears to be confirmed as
- 8 minutes from stop to doors opening
- 18 minutes to complete evacuation
- some slides were unsafe (from the fire), it’s unclear if the 3 they used were the only safe ones
It appears that initial praise for the crew may not be entirely justified. What they did right was in making sure that unsafe doors/slides were not opened & deployed. But when they obviously knew that the aircraft was burning, the evacuation was VERY slow.
It seems that most of the credit should go to some combination of bringing the damaged aircraft to a safe stop, the airframe holding up and resisting the spread of fire for long enough, passengers following instructions calmly (I saw no hand luggage in any of the footage, despite 8 minutes for people to access the bins), and perhaps just luck.
I fly pretty often so I’ve heard the airline security announcement dozens of times. It all seems to be the same whether it’s a Boeing or Airbus plane (i.e., how to buckle your seat, how to put the mask on, etc.). I’ve even sat in an exit row seat and examined the door to see how I would operate it. It’s never occurred to me that there would be a delay in exiting. I always thought we’d more or less be on our own.
Ordinarily, the flight attendants open the doors and shoo passengers out. That emergency exit training is just backup for if the flight attendants are incapacitated.
Yeah, I can tell you with smoke in the cabin and fire visible outside and knowing outcomes from prior incidents where aircraft came to a safe stop and then everyone burned, I would certainly not have “remained calm and followed instructions” if those instructions were to sit still for 8 minutes. I would have been screaming at them to get the mother****ing doors open immediately, and physically pushing them aside to do so myself if they did not appear to be acting.
I think the initial praise for the cabin crew is likely to morph into serious questions about how slowly they acted and why, perhaps too much deference to flight crew if communication was unclear or not possible, lack of assertiveness. Obviously you don’t want to open doors and deploy slides into fire, but if some doors have significant fire outside and there’s smoke in the cabin, everyone is probably going to be dead fairly soon unless you get people out quickly somehow.
The only serious injury on the flight i was on that had an emergency evacuation was a guy who had been in the Air Force. The slide failed to inflate at the exit closest to him, so he just ignored instructions and jumped. He broke a leg, but got clear of the aircraft very quickly.
Perhaps an overreaction if the aircraft was not obviously burning, but he was probably more aware than most of the dire peril.
An engine was on fire. So… Not yet burning, but the whole thing could have exploded.
Oh, right. His only mistake was that he probably should have pushed a few people out ahead of him and then jumped. “I was heroically saving them, not trying to cushion my landing!”
Kidding aside, the urgency of getting out is drilled into flight crews now.
I think this is now confirmed - I was mistaken in believing that only forward slides were used.
More details have emerged, some troubling. The story of an efficient & rapid evacuation from the A350 is called into question by these points:
- Intercom between flight deck and cabin failed, leading to a considerable delay while cabin crew waited for authorization to open doors.
- Time elapsed between skidding to a stop and last person out was 18 minutes.
The right engine was not shut down, which contributed to the restriction of just one usable slide on the right side of the plane. It’s most unlikely that the flight crew simply forgot to shut down an engine, so it will be important to work out how an engine could become uncontrollable.
It seems clear the Dash-8 was not given permission to enter the runway, but its pilot (and only survivor) believed he had been. How did this confusion arise?
None of the 3 pilots aboard the A350 saw the Dash-8 at any time before the collision. (And probably not afterward.) At night, a plane on a runway doesn’t stand out, and landing pilots are not going to be looking for one.
Haneda Airport (easily Japan’s busiest) apparently has no system to tell controllers whether a plane has taxied onto a runway. During daylight hours, controllers can check this visually; at night this becomes difficult, which means that if a transmission is misunderstood, a deadly collision becomes likely.