A US-bound ANA flight was forced to return to Tokyo after an intoxicated passenger bit a crew member mid-flight.

The man, reportedly a 55-year-old American, was "heavily drunk" when he bit a cabinet attendant's arm, slightly injuring her, a spokesman for the airline told AFP.

Japanese media said the man told police he had taken a sleeping pill and did not remember what happened.

It is the latest in a series of recent incidents to affect Japanese aviation.

The plane, which reportedly had 159 passengers on board, was over the Pacific Ocean when the incident happened, prompting its pilots to turn back to Tokyo's Haneda Airport.

There the man was handed over to police, the airline said.

It is the second incident to impact ANA in recent days - and the fifth involving the Japanese aviation industry in a matter of weeks.

On Saturday, a domestic ANA flight in Japan had to turn back after a crack was discovered in the window of the cockpit.

The crack appeared in the outermost of the four layers of window surrounding the cockpit, and there were no injuries to anyone on board.

"The crack was not something that affected the flight's control or pressurisation," an ANA spokesperson said.

The most serious of the recent incidents occurred at Haneda on 2 January, when a Japanese Airlines aircraft collided with a smaller coastguard plane.

All 379 people on board the passenger jet escaped before it burst into flames, but five of the six people on the smaller aircraft - which was supplying relief after a major earthquake hit central Japan - died.

On Tuesday, aircraft belonging to Korean Air and Cathay Pacific clipped wings at an airport on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido amid wintry conditions. There were no injuries.

A similar incident occurred on Sunday when an ANA aircraft came into "contact" with a Delta Air Lines plane at Chicago airport in the United States, the Japanese airline told AFP, also causing no injuries.