No one died as passengers left the Japan jet without their luggage

TOKYO, Jan 03 (BBC): Passengers dashed to the emergency exits of a burning Japan Airlines jet without their hand luggage, in compliance with the flight crew's instructions.
The simple act of leaving their valuables behind would be a "major factor" behind the speed of the evacuation, with the last person escaping just before the aircraft was engulfed in flames on the runway of Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Tuesday, aviation experts say.
Japan Airlines Flight 516 turned into a fireball after it collided with a coastguard plane as it landed. Five of the six people on board the smaller aircraft - which had been due to deliver aid to victims of the powerful New Year's Day earthquake - died.
But everyone on Flight 516 survived, with the flawless evacuation from cabin as it filled with smoke astounding the world and winning praise from many. Aviation experts and industry professionals told the BBC it boiled down to staff on board putting their rigorous training into practice and "well-behaved" passengers who obeyed safety protocols.
"I don't see a single passenger on the ground, in any of the videos I've seen, that has got their luggage with them… If people tried to take their cabin luggage, that's really dangerous because they would slow down the evacuation," said Prof Ed Galea, director of the fire safety engineering group at the University of Greenwich in London.
To see what happens when passengers try to take their luggage with them, one only has to look back to a crash landing in Dubai in 2016. Footage from inside the Emirates Boeing 777 involved shows people panicking as they clamber to grab their possessions, before they fled down emergency slides.
The crew were praised for their efforts to evacuate passengers, and luckily all 300 on board the Dubai flight survived - but the video from inside that aircraft contrasts starkly with the well-drilled scenes witnessed in Tokyo on Tuesday.
A former Japan Airlines flight attendant told the BBC that passengers on Tuesday's flight - which had departed from Sapporo's New Chitose airport at 16:00 local time (07:00 GMT) and landed at Haneda shortly before 18:00 - were "incredibly fortunate".
In the end, just one passenger on board flight 516 sustained bruises and 13 others requested medical consultations due to physical discomfort, the airline said.
"I felt relieved to find out that all the passengers were safe," the former flight attendant said. "But when I started thinking about the emergency evacuation procedure, I suddenly felt nervous and fearful.
"Depending on how the two planes collided and how the fire spread, it could have been a lot worse."