Pilots on a Japan Airlines plane that burst into flames upon landing at Haneda Airport in Tokyo had no "visual contact" with the aircraft it hit in the runway, the airline said Thursday.

The three JAL pilots were also unable to see the fire from the cockpit when it first broke out and were informed of it by cabin crew, the airline's spokesperson told Agence France-Presse.

The airliner collided with a coast guard plane on Tuesday evening, killing all but one of the six people on the smaller aircraft.

All 379 passengers and crew of the JAL plane escaped from the burning plane.

A ball of flame erupted from the airliner before it came to a halt and was consumed by a huge blaze, eventually leaving a charred husk on the tarmac.

One of the pilots spotted "an object" right before impact, according to JAL.

"After the plane landed and around the time when the front wheels touched or were about to touch the ground — during those few seconds, they said they felt an impact," the JAL spokesperson said.

The transport ministry has released transcripts of the flight controllers' communications, which show they approved the JAL flight's landing.

But the coast guard plane was instructed to go to a spot near the runway, the transcripts showed.

Earlier, NHK had reported that the smaller plane's pilot, Genki Miyamoto, 39, said immediately after the accident that he had permission to take off.

Evacuation

The chief flight attendant, one of nine on board, reported to the cockpit that the plane was burning as the cabin crew needed permission to open the emergency exits, broadcaster NHK reported.

By this time, the cabin was filling with smoke and getting hotter, with babies crying and people begging for the doors to be opened, footage showed.

In one video clip, a young voice can be heard shouting: "Please let us out. Please. Please open it. Just open it. Oh, god."

There were eight emergency exits but the evacuation began from two slides at the front of the plane.

Crew members opened a third exit at the rear themselves because the broken intercom system meant they couldn't request that the cockpit do so.

It took 18 minutes to evacuate the entire plane, with the pilot the last person to set foot on the tarmac at 6:05 p.m.

Soon afterwards, the aircraft was an inferno and dozens of fire engines were trying to put out the blaze, a process that ended up taking eight hours.

In the end, only two passengers suffered physical injuries such as bruises or twisted limbs, JAL said.

Investigators from Japan, France, Britain and Canada were probing the crash on Thursday, with the charred remains of the two planes still littering one of Haneda's four runways.

The flight and voice recorders from the coast guard plane have both been found, as has the flight recorder from the passenger jet — but not its voice recorder.