A British Airways jumbo jet carrying 202 passengers and crew has sliced into an office building at Johannesburg's main airport after following the wrong taxiway prior to take-off for London, injuring four people on the ground.

The Boeing 747-400, with a wingspan of 64 metres, had been instructed to use taxiway B but followed the narrower taxiway M, causing it to impact the offices, where the injuries were caused by debris from the building, South Africa's Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement today.

Embedded ... A picture released on Twitter shows the wing of a British Airways plane hitting an office building from a runway at Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo International Airport.

A kerosene spill from the fully fuelled jumbo, which would have had thousands of gallons of propellant in its wings, was contained by the airport fire services, and no one aboard was hurt, the authority said. The 747 has been removed from the office block and its flight recorders recovered for analysis.

Paul Hayes, head of safety at London-based aviation consultancy Ascend, said an airliner hits a building once every few years on average, making such incidents less common than plane-to-plane clips, which can happen three times annually.