A Japan Airlines flight collided with an earthquake relief plane at Tokyo's Haneda airport and burst into flames.



CNN

A Japan Airlines flight carrying hundreds of passengers burst into flames at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Tuesday after it collided with an earthquake relief plane.

All crew and passengers on board JAL Flight 516, including eight children under the age of two, were safely ejected from the passenger plane, the airline said, but five of the six people on board the other flight were said to have been killed.

The plane caught fire after taking off from the northern Japanese city of Sapporo to Haneda at 5:47 p.m. local time (3:47 a.m. ET).

According to Japan's public broadcaster NHK, five crew members died on the second plane, believed to be a De Havilland Canada DHC-8 operated by the Japan Coast Guard (JCG). It said the captain of the plane is in critical condition.

JAL is investigating the cause and details of the fire, an airline representative told CNN.

Video footage showed the passenger jet being consumed by a huge fireball as it moved down the runway. As firefighters tried to douse the growing flames, people used emergency slides to escape the inferno while the plane was stalled.

A JCG spokeswoman told CNN that its plane was headed from Haneda Airport to an air base in Niigata Prefecture to help with relief efforts following Monday's 7.5-magnitude earthquake.

Japan Airlines Flight 516 took off from Sapporo's New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido Prefecture to Tokyo's Haneda Airport, NHK reported.

According to NHK, there were approximately 400 passengers and crew on board.

CNN is reaching out to officials to confirm more details.

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According to flight tracking site, FlightAwareThe aircraft is an Airbus A350-900.

CNN's Emiko Jozuka and Mayumi Maruyama contributed to this article

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