A transcript of communication between air traffic control and two aircraft that collided and burst into flames at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport appears to show that only the larger Japan Airlines (JAL) flight was given permission to use the runway.

Initially 12 Australians were thought to be among 379 passengers and crew on board the JAL A-350 Airbus at the time of the collision, but on Thursday federal minister Mark Butler said that number had been revised down to eight.

All passengers and crew on the burning airliner made it out alive, but five people on the smaller aircraft died.

The transcript, released by Japan’s Transport Ministry,  covers about 4 minutes and 25 seconds just before the crash.

It appears to show no clear take-off approval was given to the Coast Guard plane that was destroyed in the collision.

According to the transcript, the Tokyo air traffic control gave the JAL plane permission to land.

“JAL516 RUNWAY 34 cleared to land,” it states.

The Japan Airlines pilot repeats: “Cleared to land RUNWAY 34R”.

The Coast Guard plane (JA722A) then contacts the control tower and is told to taxi to holding point C5.

It responds within 20 seconds, confirming the instructions: “Taxi to holding point C5 …Thank you”.

That’s where communication ends.

Two minutes later, there is a three-second pause, apparently indicating the time of the collision.

The JAL Airbus A350 had flown from Shin Chitose airport near the northern city of Sapporo.

The second aircraft, a Bombardier Dash-8, was preparing to depart for Niigata to deliver relief supplies to the regions hit by powerful earthquakes on Monday.

Two sides had different understandings of permission to use runway

JAL managing executive officer Tadayuki Tsutsumi told a news conference the A350 was making a “normal entry and landing” on the runway.

He said the pilot said he did not recognise the Bombardier.

Another JAL executive, Noriyuki Aoki, said the flight had received permission to land.

But while the transcript appears to show the Coast Guard plane was only given permission to taxi, Japan’s NHK television reported that the smaller plane’s captain, the only member of the Coast Guard crew to survive, maintained he was given permission to take off.

An official from Japan’s civil aviation bureau told reporters there was no indication in the transcripts that the Coast Guard aircraft had been granted permission to take off, according to Reuters.

Pilots and air traffic control officials under investigation

The Japan Safety Transport Board (JTSB) is investigating the accident, with participation by agencies in France, where the Airbus jet was built, and Britain, where its two Rolls-Royce engines were manufactured.

Investigators plan to interview the pilots and air traffic control officials to find out how the two planes simultaneously ended up on the runway.

A day after the collision, six experts from JTSB examined what remained of the aircraft.

TV footage showed the severely damaged A350’s wings among charred, broken parts of fuselage.

The smaller Coast Guard plane resembled a mound of rubble.

Board investigator Takuya Fujiwara said his team recovered flight data and voice recorders from the Bombardier for analysis.

Meanwhile, Tokyo police are investigating whether possible professional negligence led to deaths and injuries, several media, including Kyodo and the Nikkei business newspaper, said.

‘Strong possibility there was a human error’

Parallel air crash investigations have raised concerns in the past over tensions between civil safety investigations, which rely on open discussion of errors to help improve safety, and police-led inquiries, which are designed to apportion blame.

Experts have cautioned it is too early to pinpoint a cause and stress most accidents are caused by a cocktail of factors.

“There’s a strong possibility there was a human error,” said aviation analyst Hiroyuki Kobayashi, a former JAL pilot.

Michael Daniel, a former US accident investigator, said investigators would be looking to make recommendations.

“The main thing is the situational awareness: what is it they would have told the pilot holding short of getting on a runway … And then what was air traffic’s understanding,” he said.

Plane designed to be evacuated in 90 seconds

The 379 passengers aboard the JAL flight managed to escape just minutes before the plane was engulfed by flames.

The accident forced the cancellation of 137 domestic, and four international, flights on Wednesday, the government said.

The crash is the first significant accident involving the Airbus A350, Europe’s premier long-haul jet, in service since 2015.

It is also the first time a passenger plane built mainly from lightweight carbon composites has burned totally.

The plane is designed so that a full load of up to 440 passengers can be be evacuated within 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable.

A Japan Airlines plane crashed into a smaller aircraft.(AP: Kyodo News)

Jeffrey Epstein documents have been unsealed by a US judge. Here’s what you need to know

A US judge has unsealed a huge tranche of documents related to an old lawsuit filed by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged victims.

The late financier was a convicted sex offender, who was accused of abusing a string of underage girls.

In 2019 he was arrested on sex trafficking charges, but died by suicide before he could face trial.

His associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, an Oxford-educated heiress, is serving 20 years in prison for helping him target and sexually abuse vulnerable young girls and women.

The documents unsealed today were part of a lawsuit filed against Maxwell in 2015 by one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Giuffre.

The release of hundreds of pages of court documents was highly anticipated.

But most of the names mentioned were already publicly linked to Epstein.

During his life, Epstein went to great lengths to be in the orbit of famous people, including politicians, celebrities and academics.

Many of the high-profile men named have already confirmed that they once knew Epstein, but insist they were never aware of, or involved in, his sex trafficking ring.

Here’s what we found in the unsealed files.

Prince Andrew and the puppet allegation

It should come as no surprise that Prince Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles III, is mentioned several times in the court files.

Ms Giuffre has publicly claimed that Epstein and Maxwell forced her to have sex with the Duke of York in 2001.

Prince Andrew has consistently and vigorously denied ever meeting Ms Giuffre.

In 2022, he settled a lawsuit brought by Ms Giuffre, which did not include an admission of guilt, and said he regretted his friendship with Epstein.

In the documents, another one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Johanna Sjoberg, claims Prince Andrew groped her in 2001 while she was visiting Maxwell’s London home.

“At one point, Ghislaine told me to come upstairs, and we went into a closet and pulled out the puppet, the caricature of Prince Andrew, and brought it down. And there was a little tag on the puppet that said “Prince Andrew” on it,” she said in her 2016 deposition.

“They decided to take a picture with it, in which Virginia and Andrew sat on a couch. They put the puppet on Virginia’s lap, and I sat on Andrew’s lap, and they put the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo.”

Buckingham Palace has previously said Ms Giuffre’s allegations are “categorically untrue”, and the existence of the puppet photo has never been proven.

Bill Clinton and the deposition

Another widely anticipated name unsealed in the tranche of documents was that of former US president Bill Clinton.

Ms Giuffre claimed she had met the former president on one of the private Caribbean islands where Epstein was alleged to have sexually trafficked and assaulted underage girls.

She did not allege any wrongdoing by Mr Clinton, but her legal team repeatedly pushed for him to be subpoenaed to give testimony about his relationship with Epstein.

In the deposition of Ms Sjoberg, who was hired by Maxwell as a university student and directed to provide massages and sexual favours for Epstein, she was asked about his friendship with the former president.

Q: Do you know if Bill Clinton was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein?

A: I knew he had dealings with Bill Clinton. I did not know they were friends until I read the Vanity Fair article about them going to Africa together.

Q: Did Jeffrey ever talk to you about Bill Clinton?

A: He said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.

A spokesman for Mr Clinton said in 2019 that the former president had cut off ties with Epstein more than a decade before and didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes.

The spokesman said the former president took four flights on Epstein’s plane and once visited Epstein’s New York townhouse. He said, each time he was accompanied by his Secret Service team and was there for his Clinton Foundation work.

While flight logs from other lawsuits have shown Mr Clinton did travel on Epstein’s jet, they do not mention a visit to Epstein’s private island, Little St James.

His lawyers and a former FBI director have stated he did not visit the island.

The unsealed documents also included a deposition of Ms Giuffre in which she was questioned about an article published by Daily Mail reporter Sharon Churcher headlined “Teenage girl recruited by paedophile Jeffrey Epstein reveals how she twice met Bill Clinton”.

Ms Giuffre explained that she had told the reporter that Maxwell had flown Mr Clinton to the island via helicopter, based on what Maxwell had told her.

Q: Do you recall telling Sharon Churcher that you had conversations with Bill Clinton regarding him flying on a helicopter with Ghislaine Maxwell?

A: I believe that it was taken out of context. Ghislaine told me that she flew Bill Clinton in. And Ghislaine likes to talk a lot of stuff that sounds fantastical. And whether it’s true or not, that is what I do recall telling Sharon Churcher.

Q: So you told Sharon Churcher that Ghislaine Maxwell is the one who told you that she flew Bill Clinton in the helicopter?

A: I told Sharon Churcher that Ghislaine flew Bill Clinton onto the island, based upon what Ghislaine had told me.

Mr Clinton did not object to the unsealing.

Stephen Hawking and the email

One of the unsealed documents is an email from Epstein to Maxwell in 2015.

In the short note, he says that she should reward any of Ms Giuffre’s friends, acquaintances or family members who can prove her claims to be false.

“The strongest is the clinton dinner, and the new version in the virgin islands that stven [sic] hawking participated in an underage orgy.”

The context of his exchange with Maxwell is unknown.

The renowned British theoretical physicist met Epstein in early 2006, shortly before the financier was charged by police in Florida with unlawful sexual activity with a minor.

Hawking was one of several scientists invited to a conference on gravity at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on the Caribbean island of St Thomas.

During the conference, Epstein invited the scientists, including Hawking, to Little Saint James.

Hawking died in 2018.

Two years later, Ms Giuffre publicly denied on Twitter that she had ever been trafficked to the scientist.

Epstein, who described himself as a “science philanthropist” on his website, was notorious for his pursuit of famous intellectuals.

He gave millions to prestigious institutions such as Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Heavy redactions including one politician

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from the unsealed documents is the lengths to which Epstein went to collect famous friends.

In her testimony, Ms Sjoberg claimed that she had met several celebrities at Epstein’s home, including Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield.

She said Epstein was constantly “name dropping” but it was unclear whether he actually knew the celebrities he was discussing.

Once, she said, they were forced to land his private plane in Atlantic City because they were unable to land in New York.

“Jeffrey said, ‘Great, we’ll call up Trump,'” Ms Sjoberg testified, though it’s unclear if the call was ever made to former US president Donald Trump.

But among the newly unsealed identities, there remain a few redactions.

In a letter to Judge Loretta A Preska regarding the provision of unsealed documents, Ms Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley noted that it excluded those “pertaining to Does 105 … 107, and 110 … while the court’s review of those documents is ongoing”.

According to court documents, Jane Doe 107 applied to the court to remain anonymous, asserting that “unsealing would cause her physical harm”. A second inquiry was submitted by Doe 110 — whose gender is not stated — and is currently under review.

It is not clear whether Doe 105 applied for a similar exemption, or whether they are an alleged associate, victim or employee of Epstein’s.

Within the unsealed documents, there are some names that remain redacted — blacked out from the hundreds of pages uploaded to the court website.

In one of the depositions of Ms Giuffre, one of Maxwell’s lawyers questioned her about an email exchange with Churcher, the Daily Mail reporter.

Q: Do you recall ever telling Sharon Churcher that you were trafficked to two of the world’s most respected politicians, [REDACTED] and somebody else?

After some back and forth between lawyers, Ms Giuffre repeatedly stated that she did not know whose name had been redacted.

Q: You don’t know if you received this e-mail?

A: No, I received this e-mail, obviously, but I don’t know who’s redacted there.

The document drop was ordered by Judge Preska, who noted that most of the names in the sealed files were already named.

Today’s release might be just the beginning.

More documents are expected to be released in the coming days.