Co-pilot of Japan Coast Guard plane heard directions as well as captain

Instructions issued by air traffic control were heard by the co-pilot of a Japan Coast Guard plane as well as its captain ahead of a deadly collision with a passenger jet at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, sources at the coast guard told Nikkei on Saturday. That raises the possibility that both officers misinterpreted the directions before entering the runway where the Japan Airlines plane was to land. The Japan Transport Safety Board, part of the nation's transport ministry, has started interviewing air traffic controllers and has also retrieved the voice recorder from the JAL airliner. Five of the six crew members of the coast guard craft, including the co-pilot, were killed in the accident on Tuesday. For safe takeoffs and landings, both the captain and co-pilot listen to air traffic control instructions at the same time, according to coast guard officials. They check each other's understanding of directions and if there is any suspicion the captain has misunderstood, the co-pilot asks the captain to request that instructions be repeated. The captain has said that he was "given permission to enter the runway" ahead of the collision. Both captain and co-pilot listening to instructions from air traffic control is part of a set of procedures known as crew resource management, or CRM, which seeks to make the best use of available personnel to assure safe and efficient operations. CRM has accelerated in aviation since two passenger airplanes collided on a runway in Spain's Canary Islands in 1977, killing 583 people. It was found that one of the causes of that accident was the engineer in the cockpit hesitating to give his opinion to the captain. The JTSB believes CRM did not work ahead of Tuesday's accident and will look into the issue.<br/>