Airlines

All Nippon Airways' permanent aviation safety wreckage museum opens, aims to raise safety awareness in Japan

By Nicholas Ionides

Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA) has opened to the public a permanent centre featuring wreckage from accidents in a bid to raise safety awareness. 

The ANA Safety Education Centre (ASEC) opened to staff in January and it was opened by appointment to members of the public from last week. 

Located at the carrier’s training facility in Shimo-Maruko, near Tokyo’s Haneda airport, ASEC was the brainchild of a member of the airline’s Haneda ground staff around two years ago. 

“The more safety conscious we get, the better our safety record gets,” says ANA. 

The airline has not had a fatal accident since 1971, when one of its passenger aircraft collided with a Japanese Self Defence Force aircraft. But it says that as older staff have retired and the majority of the airline’s current employees joined after 1971, “the memory of past accidents” has been fading.

The centre features wreckage as well as media reports and other documentation relating to all of the airline’s fatal accidents, as well as interactive displays.

ANA as a group employs around 30,000 people and the intention is for “everybody to go through it at some stage in their career”, it says. 

The carrier says management agreed it was a good idea and planning began immediately after rival Japan Airlines (JAL) opened a similar centre last year that features wreckage and documentation from its past accidents.  Flight's regional managing editor for Asia, Nicholas Ionides has been to the JAL Safety Promotion Centre in Tokyo and posted his first-hand experience of the exhibits as a blog. His pictures from the JAL museum's displays of parts of the 1985 crash of a Boeing 747SR operating as flight 123 are below.

All images © Nicholas Ionides / Flight International