Air operations returned to normal on Monday at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, six days after a passenger jet collided with a smaller plane that killed five people, AFP reported, according to Agerpres.

The wreckage of a Japan Airlines plane that caught fire at Haneda Airport in TokyoPhoto: Koki Kataoka/AP/Profimedia

The 379 passengers and crew of a Japan Airlines Airbus managed to escape from the burning cockpit after a collision with a Coast Guard plane on January 2, but five of the six people on board died.

The runway where the accident happened, one of four at Haneda Airport, was closed, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of flights, mostly domestic, at one of the world’s busiest airports.

“Runway C has resumed operations today (Monday),” so the airport has returned to normal operations, a spokeswoman told AFP.

Japanese, French, British and Canadian investigators are involved in trying to explain the accident.

A transcript of the communication with the control tower minutes before the crash, released last week by the transport ministry, shows that the Coast Guard plane was ordered to stop and the JAL plane was allowed to land.

Coast Guard captain Genki Miyamoto, the sole survivor of the collision, said after the crash that he had been cleared to take off, Japanese media reported.

Accidents involving passenger planes are extremely rare in Japan. The worst occurred in 1985, when a Japan Airlines plane crashed between Tokyo and Osaka, killing 520 people, making it one of the world’s deadliest air crashes.