On
Christmas Eve, 1971, just a few hours after attending her high school graduation, 17 year
old Juliane Koepcke and her mother, Maria, got on a flight from Lima, Peru to Pucallpa.
The two were headed out to join Juliane’s father, Hans-Wilhelm, a famous German zoologist
who was working at a remote research station in the rainforest.
Approximately 30 minutes into the flight, the plane entered very thick, black clouds.
“The clouds became darker and darker and the flight became more turbulent.
Then we were in the midst of pitch-black clouds and a proper storm with thunder and lightning,”
said Koepcke.
“It was pitch-black all around us and there was constant lightning.
Then I saw a glistening light on the right wing…
The motor was hit by lightning.
”
While planes get struck by lightning all the time with no real problems ensuing, this time
there was a big problem.
Directly after the wing was struck, the aircraft was ripped apart, largely thanks to the fact
that the Electra aircraft they were on wasn’t built for flying in heavy turbulence to begin
with, due to its very rigid wings.
Contrary to what is often reported, Koepcke states the wing “definitely didn’t explode.”
Rather, the plane was simply ripped apart in the air after the wing fell off.
The last words Koepcke ever heard from her mother were when the lightning struck the
wing, “it’s all over”…
LIES!!!
Well, at least for her daughter (and technically not the immediate end for her mother either,
as you’ll soon see).
Still strapped to her seat, Juliane Koepcke was ejected from the aircraft and fell approximately
2 miles into the dense Peruvian rainforest.
I heard the incredibly loud motor and people screaming and then the plane fell extremely
steeply.
And then it was calm—incredibly calm compared with the noise before that.
I could only hear the wind in my ears.
I was still attached to my seat.
My mother and the man sitting by the aisle had both been propelled out of their seats.
I was free-falling, that’s what I registered for sure.
I was in a tailspin.
I saw the forest beneath me—like ‘green cauliflower, like broccoli,’ is how I described
it later on.
Then I lost consciousness and regained it only way later, the next day.
Koepcke became the sole survivor of Lansa flight 508, all 91 other passengers and crew
died.
It isn’t known what exact factors played into Juliane’s surviving the fall.
Some have speculated that her fall was slowed by the row of seats she was strapped to rotating
like a helicopter, and then helped cushion her landing thanks to striking the dense forest
on her way down.
The actual cushion of her seat itself also likely played a small role.
Whatever the case, over the next 19 hours or so, Koepcke lapsed in and out of consciousness
and at some point unknown to her, she managed to unstrap herself from her seat and crawl
under it, she thinks as a response to rain.
Finally, at 9am, she became lucid and in somewhat of a daze took stock of her situation.
She was lying on the ground, dressed in only a sleeveless mini-dress and was missing one
of her sandals and glasses.
While she didn’t realize all her injuries at the time, she had survived the fall with
a broken collar bone; a torn ACL; one of her eyes swollen shut; her capillaries in her
eyes had popped (due to rapid decompression from the plane); a strained vertebrae in her
neck; a partially fractured shin; and several deep cuts on her arms and legs.
It took her half the day just to be able to stand without getting too dizzy, but eventually
she managed it and at first set out to find her mother, searching for a full day before
giving up.
During her search for her mother, though, she did find a bag of candy, which was her
only food she had during her journey, and more importantly, a stream.
Her father had once given her the very good advice that if she were ever lost in the rainforest
and came across a stream or river, she should follow it downstream; because people tend
to live on or near water, following a river long enough, should get you to civilization
eventually.
She then set out.
She knew from experience that snakes particularly liked to lay camouflaged under dry leaves,
so when she wasn’t walking in the water, she used her one shoe, thrown before her,
to test the ground for snakes and the like (she couldn’t see very well due to missing
her glasses).
Luckily, she never encountered any, that she saw at least.
She walked as much as possible in the river as it was an easier way to go, rather than
through the dense foliage.
Of course, this came with hazards of its own.
Within a couple days, she started hearing King vultures around her, the sound of which
she recognized from living at her parent’s research station a year and a half before,
only about 30 miles from where the plane crashed.
Because King vultures usually only land when there is carrion around, she figured there
must be dead bodies about that they were feeding on, but at first didn’t encounter any.
On the fourth day, she finally spotted some; three other passengers still strapped to their
seats and rammed several feet, headfirst into the ground.
I couldn’t really see that much, only people’s feet pointing up.
I poked their feet with a stick.
I couldn’t touch the dead bodies.
I couldn’t smell anything and they hadn’t been eaten yet or started to decay.
I mean, sure, decay must have started, but I couldn’t notice it.
I could tell it was a woman because she had polished toenails and the others must have
been two men, judging by their pants and shoes.
I moved on after a while, but in the first moment after finding them, it was like I was
paralyzed.
During her trek, several of her wounds became infected and a large cut on her right arm
was infested with maggots.
This is something she’d seen happen to her dog before, with near disastrous results for
the dog.
Try as she might, though, she couldn’t manage to get the maggots out as they were too deep
in the wound.
“I had this ring that was open on one side that you could squeeze together, and I tried
with that.
It didn’t work because the hole was so deep.
So I tried with a stick, but that didn’t work either.”
On the tenth day she came across a boat, which in her delirious state at this point, she
thought was a mirage until she finally came up to it and touched it.
Next to the boat was a path, which she crawled up (at this point being extremely weak, making
walking up the path somewhat difficult).
At the end of the path was a small hut that was being used by lumbermen.
Empty at the time, she found an outboard motor and some diesel fuel in a barrel.
She used a tube to suck out some of the fuel from the barrel and put that on her wound
that was maggot infested, something her father had done to her dog, though with kerosene.
Albeit extremely painful, this worked and most of the maggots, while initially trying
to burrow deeper into her arm, eventually came to the surface and she was able pick
them out.
She then tried to sleep in the hut, but found the ground to be much too hard, so she went
back down to the river side and laid in the sand.
The next day, she woke up and, hearing frogs all around her, tried to catch some to eat.
Luckily for her she was unable to as they were poisonous dart frogs.
At this point, she was debating whether to take the boat or not, something she didn’t
want to do as it was stealing, but ultimately decided to spend the night at the hut.
She ended up not having to do so alone, though, because she soon heard voices, “like hearing
angels’ voices”.
Three people came out of the forest and spotted her.
At first they thought she was a “Yemanjá”, a type of blond, pale skinned water spirit.
“When they saw me, they were pretty freaked out.”
However, she explained what had happened and how she got there, and they had heard of the
plane crash, so accepted her tale.
They then fed her and cared for her wounds as best they could and took her downstream
on about a seven hour boat ride to a lumber station/village.
(who says the deforestation of the rainforest is all bad?
That’s one life that would have ended had there been no lumbermen about) 😉
Once there, a local pilot knew of some missionaries nearby running a hospital in Pucuallpa.
The pilot took her on what must have been a freaky, for Juliane, 15 minute flight to
the hospital and the day after her rescue, she was reunited with her father.
She then helped the search parties locate the crash site.
On January 12th, they finally discovered her mother’s body.
Like Juliane, her mother apparently survived the fall.
However, her injuries prevented her from moving and she ended up dying several days later.
Now known as Juliane Diller, she has a PhD in Zoology and is a librarian at the Bacarian
State Zoological Collection in Munich.
Her autobiography “When I Fell From The Sky