Japan Airlines collision: Flyer recounts fire horror, says ‘emergency doors opened, we threw ourselves’

“It was hell,” said Swede Anton Deibe (17), who was one of the passengers on the Japanese Airlines flight which caught on fire after colliding with a Coast Guard jet on Tuesday. He was travelling with his parents and sister and was among the 379 people who miraculously escaped without any harm from the collision.

“The entire cabin was filled with smoke within a few minutes. We threw ourselves down on the floor. Then the emergency doors were opened and we threw ourselves at them,” Deibe told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. Visuals captured at the airport showed the emergency doors of the flight agape as people rushed out of the aircraft.

The 17-year-old said the smoke inside the cabin “stung like hell” and people had no idea where they were going, so they just ran out onto the field after the flight landed. Videos taken by the passengers inside showed the flight in flames and smoke filling up the cabin as it landed. People were shouting as flames could be seen out the windows.

“It was chaos,” said Swede Anton Deibe.

Another passenger described the moment the two aircraft collided and said, “I felt a boom like we had hit something and jerked upward the moment we landed.” The passenger told Kyodo news agency that there were sparks outside the window as the cabin got filled with gas and smoke.

Kaoru Ishii, a mother who was waiting for her 29-year-old daughter and boyfriend to come back on the flight, said she initially thought the flight was delayed until her daughter called to explain. “She said the plane had caught fire, and she exited via a slide,” said Ishii.

Ishii expressed her relief on receiving news from her daughter.

Live footage on public broadcaster NHK showed the Japan Airlines aircraft bursting into flames as it skidded down the runway. Footage an hour later showed the plane fully on fire.

While all 379 people on board the flight managed to escape before the aircraft was entirely engulfed in flames, five of the six crew who were on the Coast Guard plane died. The captain of the aircraft was injured.

The coast guard plane was due to head to Niigata to deliver relief materials to the people affected by the series of earthquakes on Monday that killed at least 48 people.