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TOKYO: A Taiwanese airliner burst into fire on Monday moments after landing in southern Japan but all 165 passengers and crew made a dramatic escape from the engulfing flames.
Giant flames and plumes of black smoke erupted from the China Airlines jet just eight minutes after it had landed from Taipei at Naha airport on Okinawa island.
"When we looked out the window, everything was covered with fire," an unidentified male passenger told reporters.
"It was just a few minutes after we got off that the fire swallowed the aircraft and we heard a blast."
Fire fighters sprayed hoses full of foam on the Boeing 737-800, which turned into little more than a charred skeleton that had collapsed into pieces by the time the blaze was put out an hour later.
Officials said three people were taken to hospital -- a 57-year-old man and seven-year-old girl who felt sick after the escape and a fire fighter who suffered heat stroke.
A flight attendant was also hurt but did not go to hospital.
Air traffic controllers noticed fumes after the plane landed following the flight of one hour and 20 minutes, and advised evacuation, Japanese officials said.
It was later found that an oil leak had caused an engine fire, according to China Airlines.
"When the fire broke out there was a huge bang and passengers were still in the midst of evacuating," Toshimasa Yamamoto, a witness at the airport, told Tokyo Broadcasting System.
"When the passengers appeared to be finishing the evacuation, the fire engulfed the entire plane. It really was a close call," he said.
All 157 passengers evacuated through emergency slides, said Akihiko Tamura, a transport ministry official in Tokyo.
The two pilots and six other crew members also made it out safely, Tamura said. One witness account said the pilot climbed out of the cockpit on a rope.
"It's unfortunate that the explosion happened, but it is fortunate that everyone is safe," Tamura told a news conference in Tokyo.
In Taipei, China Airlines also confirmed the safety of all passengers. The airline put the passenger number at 155, not including two infants without tickets.
"Everything was normal, including take-off and landing, until the pilots were told the airplane was on fire," China Airlines spokesman Johnson Sun told reporters.
Chang Kuo-cheng, head of Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration, grounded the airline's 11 other 737-800s for safety checks as well as two from its Mandarin Airlines subsidiary.
Japan's transport ministry said the fire started in an engine on the left wing of the plane after the oil leak. It said there were no indications of a terrorist attack.
Okinawa, a subtropical island which lies closer to Taiwan than Tokyo, is a popular tourist destination and is ordinarily packed with Japanese visitors during the ongoing summer holiday season.
The incident will likely rekindle memories in Japan of a major crash by a China Airlines plane in 1994. In that incident, 264 people were killed as the Airbus A300 nosedived on landing in the central Japanese city of Nagoya. - AFP/ac
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