TL;DR: ATC says they gave JAL Airbus clearance to land and told the Coast Guard Dash 8 to hold at the threshold. The Dash 8 pilot says they were given clearance to take off. (Procedurally I think takeoff clearance happens after the aircraft is given clearance to enter the runway, but that’s how the article is written. Also I’m not a pilot)
My speculation follows: Most likely IMO the ATC is correct, the Airbus was given clearance and the Dash 8 was instructed to hold. On the safety side either the Dash 8 pilot flying did not repeat back the instructions given, or they did and the ATC didn’t realize their instructions were misheard. Less likely but possible is the ATC gave conflicting instructions to both aircraft.
As with any investigation the point is not to place blame, but to see what safety measures failed and what mitigating factors could be adopted to reduce future incidents.
The official ATC transcripts have been released and it is unfortunately not quite this simple.
[ATC] JA722A Tokyo Tower. Good evening. No.1, taxi to holding point C-5.
[JA722A] Taxi to holding point C-5, JA722A No.1. Thank you.
While JA722A clearly did not have ATC clearance to enter the runway, the ATC instruction seems to me non-standard phrasing, which arguably left this open to interpretation. Especially because there is no “holding point” C-5 (there is only intersection C-5) and ATC did not stipulate to hold short of 34R.Miyamoto (the DHC-8 captain) may have interpreted this as an instruction to enter onto 34R at C-5 and hold.
Edit: the ATC instruction and the read back were both in standard ICAO phraseology.
Ooh, thank you, i was purely speculating (obviously lol). I’m gonna look at an airport map when i get home to get a little more clarification. Is intersection C5 the intersection of the taxiway at runway 34R?
It seems like the standard call would be something like “Taxi to intersection C5 and hold short of runway 34R for traffic” or something like that. From what little i do know if this, there should be standard phrasing for almost every normal direction from ATC yeah? I will be curious to see if there are changes to SOP after this. Even pure human error generally has a systemic issue that caused it
Also don’t some airports have essentially traffic control lighting that is tied to ground radar and ATC? (I’m using ATC generically, i know there’s a least a couple different control frequencies and teams) Or maybe i dreamed that after binging Admiral Cloudberg write-ups
I’m happy to share my extensive write-up that includes the relevant area of the airport chart. Some of those insights were written following a conversation with Admiral Cloudberg.
Regarding the Stop Bar Lighting, it was unfortunately inoperative at junctions C-1 to C-14 since Dec 27 as per a NOTAM bulletin.
That write-up is amazing and i love you for it. Also cool that you know the Admiral. Thanks for the work you put into that write-up and filling me in too
Thank you, I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I can’t say that I know Kyra, we just exchanged some messages on a Reddit thread.