Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, for Wednesday the 3rd of January 2024.

About one hour after I posted my last podcast, which was marking the extraordinary year of 2023 in terms of aviation safety.

Very sadly, we saw the impact between a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 coming into land at Tokyo's Haneda Airport

and a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft which was on the ground at Henaida Airport.

We still do not know what happened and there will be, of course, amid all the speculation here,

there will be a very detailed investigation going on that will involve, among others,

the Japanese Aviation Authority, of course, Japan Airlines themselves, the aircraft manufacturer,

Airbus, and the French Accident Investigation unit, the BEA.

And they will be doing all they can to find out what happened.

In particular, how the most fundamental principle of air traffic control,

keeping aircraft safely apart, appears to have failed. There's huge amounts

online already about what might or might not happen, but rather than get caught up in that

speculation of what the investigators will find, I'm going to wait for the accident report, which I shall study,

but I want to talk about how it makes you feel.

The sight of an aircraft with almost 400 people on board,

careering down a runway in flames is just absolutely horrifying. Watching the blaze was just

terrible beyond measure. And of course, we now know that in the aircraft that the Airbus A350

was in collision with, we had, very sadly, the loss of five lives.

The captain of that aircraft escaped.

A lot of people, I think, will look at the pictures and just think, well, I'm never going to get on an aircraft again. Look

how dangerous they are. But I think that is exactly the wrong message to take away.

Thanks to an extraordinarily professional evacuation of the aircraft, which is a tribute to the cabin

...