On August 25, Taiwan's China Airlines denied that it had ignored warning signals about a plane that burst into flames in Japan with 165 people on board.

The China Times had reported that a warning signal for one wing had appeared for two consecutive days but that the airline had simply replaced a sensor to "solve" the problem. The paper said the company ignored the warnings, and this eventually led to the blaze on the runway in the island of Okinawa.

All 165 passengers and crew escaped to safety, sliding down emergency chutes with just moments to spare as the Boeing 737-800 exploded.

China Airlines spokesman Johnson Sun dismissed the report, saying the two incidents were not related.

Investigators in Japan said they had found a hole in the fuel tank of the plane that could explain the blaze.

The investigators found a bolt had come off a movable flap on the front of the right wing called a slat, but they could not find why the bolt came off.

"On August 4 and 5 there were [warning] signals on the No. 1 left slat. We replaced the sensor following an inspection and after that everything was normal," Sun said.

Jiji Press reported that Boeing had issued a warning to airlines last year to check for bolts piercing the tank as there had been previous incidents.

Since 1970 China Airlines has reported nine accidents with fatalities.

Analysts said the incident is a setback for the airline, which launched a safety overhaul after February 1998 when a plane plowed into a row of houses in Taipei, killing 196 passengers and crew and six people on the ground.