Tokyo: Pilots on a Japan Airlines plane that burst into flames just after all 379 passengers and crew escaped had no “visual contact” with the other aircraft in the collision, the airline said Thursday.
The three pilots were also unable to see the fire from the cockpit when it first broke out and were informed of it by cabin crew, a JAL spokesman told AFP.
The airliner hit a coast guard plane after landing at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Tuesday evening. All but one of the six people on the smaller aircraft were killed.
A ball of flame erupted from the airliner before it came to a halt and was consumed by a huge blaze, eventually leaving a charred husk on the tarmac.
But the pilots said they had no “visual contact” with the other plane, although one of them spotted “an object” right before impact, according to JAL.
“After the plane landed and around the time when the front wheels touched or were about to touch the ground — during those few seconds, they said they felt an impact,” the spokesman said.
The chief flight attendant, one of nine on board, reported to the cockpit that the plane was burning as the cabin crew needed permission to open the emergency exits, broadcaster NHK reported.
By this time, the cabin was filling with smoke and getting hotter, with babies crying and people begging for the doors to be opened, footage showed.
In one video clip, a young voice can be heard shouting: “Please let us out. Please. Please open it. Just open it. Oh, god.”
There were eight emergency exits but the evacuation began from two slides at the front of the plane because of the fire.
Crew members opened a third exit at the rear themselves because the broken intercom system meant they couldn’t request that the cockpit do so.
It took 18 minutes to evacuate the entire plane, with the pilot the last person to set foot on the tarmac at 6:05 pm.
Soon afterwards, the aircraft was an inferno and dozens of fire engines were trying to put out the blaze, a process that ended up taking eight hours.
“Honestly, I thought we wouldn’t survive,” another woman told broadcaster NHK.
In the end, only two passengers suffered physical injuries such as bruises or twisted limbs, JAL said.
“Passengers seemed to have followed instructions in a textbook manner,” Terence Fan, an airline industry expert from Singapore Management University told AFP.
Investigators from Japan, France, Britain and Canada were probing the crash on Thursday, with the charred remains of the two planes still littering one of Haneda’s four runways.
The flight and voice recorders from the coast guard plane have both been found, as has the flight recorder from the passenger jet — but not its voice recorder.
The transport ministry has released transcripts of the flight controllers’ communications, which show they approved the JAL flight’s landing.
But the coast guard plane was instructed to go to a spot near the runway, the transcripts showed.
Earlier, NHK had reported that the pilot, Genki Miyamoto, 39, said immediately after the accident that he had permission to take off.
JAL said it expected a damage cost of 15 billion yen ($105 million) for the destroyed plane, which should be covered by insurance, and is calculating damage to company earnings.
Japan has not experienced a serious commercial air crash for decades.
In 1985, a JAL jumbo jet flying from Tokyo to Osaka crashed, killing 520 passengers and crew, in one of the world’s deadliest crashes involving a single flight.
The world’s worst civil aviation disaster also happened on the ground when two Boeing 747s collided at Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife in 1977, killing 583 people.
Japan Airlines pilots had no ‘visual contact’ before collision
https://arab.news/vqx9y
Japan Airlines pilots had no ‘visual contact’ before collision
- Airliner hit coast guard plane after landing at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport
- Three pilots unable to see fire from cockpit when first broke out
Iraq detains Daesh suspect accused of helping to incite New Orleans truck ramming attack
- Iraqi authorities had received requests from the US to help in the investigation of the attack in the predawn hours of New Years Day
- A US Army veteran driving a pickup truck that bore the flag of the Daesh group sped down Bourbon Street, running over some victims and ramming others
An official with the Daesh group has been detained in Iraq, suspected of being involved with inciting the pickup truck-ramming attack in New Orleans that killed more than a dozen people celebrating the start of 2025, Iraqi authorities said.
Iraqi authorities had received requests from the US to help in the investigation of the attack in the predawn hours of New Years Day in the famed French Quarter of New Orleans, Iraqi judicial officials said.
A US Army veteran driving a pickup truck that bore the flag of the Daesh group sped down Bourbon Street, running over some victims and ramming others, authorities said at the time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation identified the driver as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a US citizen from Texas, and said it was working to determine any potential associations with terrorist organizations.
After driving his pickup truck onto a sidewalk around a police car blocking an entrance to Bourbon Street and striking the New Year’s revelers, he crashed into construction equipment, authorities said. He then opened fire on police officers and Bourbon Street crowds, and was shot and killed by the officers, authorities said.
The FBI said shortly after the attack that it was investigating the crime as a terrorist act and did not believe the driver acted alone. Investigators found guns and what appeared to be an improvised explosive device in the vehicle, along with other devices elsewhere in the French Quarter.
Iraqi officials said that Baghdad’s Al-Karkh Investigative Court specified the suspect who was later detained and turned out to be a member of the Daesh group’s foreign operations office.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, did not release the name of the suspect, only saying that he is an Iraqi citizen. The officials said the man will be put on trial in accordance with the country’s anti-terrorism law, adding that Iraq is committed to international cooperation in fighting terrorism.
Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, Daesh group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attack in both countries as well as other parts of the world.
The group once attracted tens of thousands of fighters and supporters from around the world to come to Syria and Iraq, and at its peak ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom and was notorious for its brutality. It beheaded civilians, slaughtered 1,700 captured Iraqi soldiers in a short period, and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.
World Food Program and other UN aid agencies slash jobs amid US funding cuts, officials say
- The WFP, also a United Nations organization, is expected to cut up to 30 percent of its staff
- UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply troubled by the drastic funding reduction”
UNITED NATIONS: The World Food Program and the United Nations refugee agency will slash jobs because of funding cuts, mainly from the United States, officials told AP on Tuesday, warning the reductions will severely affect aid programs worldwide.
The WFP, also a United Nations organization, is expected to cut up to 30 percent of its staff. The head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said it would downsize its headquarters and regional offices to reduce costs by 30 percent and cut senior-level positions by 50 percent.
That’s according to internal memos obtained by The AP and verified by two UN officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal personnel decisions. Other agencies like UNICEF — the UN children’s agency, and OCHA — the organization’s humanitarian agency — have also announced or plan to announce cuts that would impact around 20 percent of staff and overall budgets.
One WFP official called the cuts “the most massive” seen by the agency in the past 25 years, and that as a result, operations will disappear or be downsized.
The cuts to the UN agencies underscore the impact of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull back the US from its position as the world’s single largest aid donor. Trump has given billionaire ally Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency power to redo the scale of the federal government, with a focus on slashing foreign assistance. Even before the administration’s move, many donor nations had reduced humanitarian spending, and UN agencies struggled to reach funding goals.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply troubled by the drastic funding reduction.”
“The heads of our humanitarian agencies are being forced to take impossibly painful decisions as budget cuts have an immediate and often deadly impact on the world’s most vulnerable,” Dujarric said in a statement to The AP. “We understand the pressures on national budgets faced by governments, but these cuts come at a time when military spending again hits record levels.”
World Food Program
The WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, received 46 percent of its funding from the United States in 2024.
Asked about the planned cuts, the organization said in a statement that “in this challenging donor environment, WFP will prioritize its limited resources on vital programs that bring urgently needed food assistance to the 343 million people struggling with hunger and increasingly facing starvation.”
The internal memo said personnel cuts will “impact all geographies, divisions and levels” in the agency. It suggested further downsizing may be needed and said the agency will review its “portfolio of programs.”
In early April, The AP reported that the Trump administration had sent notices terminating funding for WFP programs in more than a dozen countries. The terminations were reversed days later in several countries but maintained the cuts in Afghanistan and Yemen, two of the world’s poorest and most war-ravaged countries.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees
The UN’s top refugee agency provides help to some 43.7 million refugees worldwide, along with others among the 122 million people driven from their homes by conflicts and natural disasters.
It said a statement that the agency will “have to significantly reduce our workforce,” including downsizing the headquarters and regional offices. UNHCR said some country offices will be closed, but it did not give an immediate figure of how many staff will be cut.
“The impact of this funding crunch on refugees’ lives is already devastating and will get far worse,” the agency said. Programs providing food, clean water, medicines, emergency shelter and other services “will reduce or stop.”
For example, it said, reduced funding will cut access to clean water for at least half a million displaced people in Sudan, increasing the risk of cholera and other disease outbreaks.
It will also hurt efforts to house and provide schooling for refugees from Sudan in South Sudan, Chad and Uganda. It warned that the lack of facilities in host countries will push more refugees to attempt dangerous crossings to Europe.
In the April 23 email to staff, the UNHCR chief said the headquarters and regional offices will be downsized to cut costs by 30 percent. It said senior-level positions will be capped to bring a 50 percent reduction.
The cuts “will affect our operations, the size of our organization, and, most worryingly, the very people we are called to protect,” it said. “It is critical that we prioritize, as we always have, the well-being and safety of refugees and of displaced and stateless people.”
UNHCR’s office in Lebanon — which is home to some 1 million refugees from Syria, is only 15 percent funded, its spokesperson Lisa Abou Khaled said.
This month, it had to stop cash assistance to 347,000 refugees — two-thirds of the number it previously helped — and funding for the remaining 200,000 will last only through June, she said. It also halted primary health services for some 40,000 refugees.
UNICEF
The UN children’s agency told AP in a statement Tuesday that it projects that its funding will be at least 20 percent less in 2025 compared to 2024.
“Hard-earned gains and future progress for children are at risk because of a global funding crisis in which some donors are sharply decreasing their financial support to UNICEF and our partners, as well as their contributions to international aid more broadly,” a UNICEF spokesperson said.
The organization said that while it has already implemented efficiency measures, “more cost-cutting steps will be required.” Officials are looking at “every aspect” of their sprawling operations in over 190 countries and territories, which focus on delivering life-saving and life-sustaining humanitarian aid and advocating for policies that promote children’s rights.
International Organization for Migration
The UN agency said last month that it had been hit by a 30 percent decrease in funding for the year, mainly because of US cuts. It said it was ending programs that affect 6,000 personnel and reducing its staff at headquarters by 20 percent.
Swedish police say several people injured in apparent shooting
- Police said they had received calls from members of the public
- “Several people have been found with injuries that indicate gunfire”
STOCKHOLM: Several people were injured in the Swedish city of Uppsala on Tuesday after a series of loud bangs that indicated gunfire, police said, without immediately providing any further details on what might have happened.
In a statement, the police said they had received calls from members of the public who heard noises that sounded like gunshots being fired in the city center. Emergency services are on the scene, the police added.
“Several people have been found with injuries that indicate gunfire,” the statement said.
A local hospital declined to comment on the condition of those injured.
Police said they had cordoned off a large area and had begun an investigation.
Ten people were killed in February in the Swedish city of Orebro in the country’s deadliest ever mass shooting, in which a 35-year-old unemployed loner opened fire on students and teachers at an adult education center.
The Nordic country’s right-wing government subsequently said it would seek to
tighten gun laws.
Zelensky calls for fair peace with no ‘rewards’ for Putin
- “We all want this war to end in a fair way — with no rewards for Putin, especially no land,” Zelensky said
- Moscow holds about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Tuesday for a “fair” end to the war with Russia without “rewards” for Vladimir Putin, pushing back against demands for Kyiv to make territorial concessions.
“We all want this war to end in a fair way — with no rewards for Putin, especially no land,” Zelensky said via videoconference at a summit organized by Poland.
The comment came amid reports the United States suggested to freeze the front line and accept the Russian control of the Crimean peninsula, which it seized in 2014, something Zelensky balks at.
But US President Donald Trump said Sunday he believed the Ukrainian leader might concede the Black Sea peninsula as part of a settlement.
Russia has also repeatedly demanded to keep the territory in southern and eastern Ukraine that it occupies and for Kyiv to cede even more land.
Moscow holds about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory after launching its 2022 invasion that has killed thousands of people and devastated swathes of land.
Washington has said that this week will be “critical” for peace efforts.
Over 72,000 migrants dead, disappeared globally since 2014: UN
- One in four were “from countries affected by humanitarian crises ,” said the IOM’s Missing Migrants Report
- More than 52,000 people died while trying to escape from one of the 40 countries in the world where the UN has a crisis response plan
GENEVA: More than 72,000 deaths and disappearances have been documented along migration routes around the world in the past decade, most of them in crisis-affected countries, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Last year saw the highest migrant death toll on record, with at least 8,938 people dying on migration routes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
“These numbers are a tragic reminder that people risk their lives when insecurity, lack of opportunity, and other pressures leave them with no safe or viable options at home,” IOM chief Amy Pope said in a statement.
The report by her UN agency found that nearly three-quarters of all migrant deaths and disappearances recorded globally since 2014 occurred as people fled insecurity, conflict, disaster and other humanitarian crises.
One in four were “from countries affected by humanitarian crises, with the deaths of thousands of Afghans, Rohingya, and Syrians documented on migration routes worldwide,” said the IOM’s Missing Migrants Report.
The report said that more than 52,000 people died while trying to escape from one of the 40 countries in the world where the UN has a crisis response plan or humanitarian response plan in place.
Pope urged international investment “to create stability and opportunity within communities, so that migration is a choice, not a necessity.”
“And when staying is no longer possible, we must work together to enable safe, legal, and orderly pathways that protect lives.”
The Central Mediterranean remains the deadliest migration route in the world, with nearly 25,000 people lost at sea in the past decade, IOM said.
More than 12,000 of those had been lost at sea after departing from war-torn Libya, with countless others disappearing while transiting the Sahara Desert, the report said.
More than 5,000 people died while trying to leave crisis-ravaged Afghanistan in the past decade, many of them since the Taliban retook power in 2021.
And more than 3,100 members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority had died during the period, many in shipwrecks or while crossing into Bangladesh.
“Too often, migrants fall through the cracks,” warned Julia Black, coordinator of IOM’s Missing Migrants Project and author of the report.
“And due to data gaps — especially in war zones and disaster areas — the true death toll is likely far higher than what we’ve recorded,” she said in the statement.
