Sole Survivor: The Woman Who Fell To Earth

In 1971 Juliane Koepcke survived a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle. Only now can she bear to tell the full story, in her memoir When I Fell from the Sky

A high school student was sucked out of an airplane after it was struck by lightning. She fell 3.2 kilometers to the ground still strapped to her chair and lived. Only to endure a 9 day walk to the nearest civilization.

Juliane Diller (born 10 October 1954 in Lima as Juliane Margaret Koepcke) is a German biologist, born in Peru to German emigrants who is best known for being the sole survivor of 93 passengers and crew in the 24 December 1971, crash of LANSA Flight 508 (a LANSA Lockheed Electra OB-R-941 commercial airliner) in the Peruvian rain forest. After her airliner broke up in midair, she survived after falling about 3 km (10,000 feet) still strapped to her airliner seat, before the seat crashed through the rain forest canopy and came to rest on the forest floor.

Airplane crash: Juliane Koepcke was a German Peruvian high school senior student studying in Lima, intending to become a zoologist, like her parents. She and her mother, ornithologist Maria Koepcke, were traveling to meet with her father, biologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, who was working in the city of Pucallpa.

The airplane was struck by lightning during a severe thunderstorm and broke up in mid-air, disintegrating at 3.2 km (10,000 ft). Koepcke, who was seventeen years old at the time, fell to earth still strapped into her seat. She survived the fall with only a broken collarbone, a gash to her right arm, and her right eye swollen shut. "I was definitely strapped in [the airplane seat] when I fell," she remembered. "It must have turned and buffered the crash, otherwise I wouldn't have survived."

Her first priority was to find her mother, who had been seated next to her on the plane but her search was unsuccessful. With her eyeglasses lost and one eye swollen shut, she struggled to no avail. She later found out her mother had initially survived the crash as well, but died several days later due to her injuries.

Koepcke found some sweets which were to become her only food on her trip. After looking for her mother and other passengers, she was soon able to locate a small stream. She then waded through knee-high water downstream from her landing site, relying on the survival principle her father had taught her, that tracking downstream should eventually lead to civilization. The stream also provided clean water and a natural path through the dense rainforest vegetation.
During the trip, Koepcke couldn't sleep at night due to numerous insect bites, which became infected. After nine days, several spent floating downstream, she found a boat moored near a shelter, where she found the boat's motor and fuel tank. Relying again on her father's advice, Koepcke poured gasoline on her wounds, which managed to extract thirty five maggots from one arm, then waited until rescuers arrived. She later recounted her necessary efforts that day: "I remember having seen my father when he cured a dog of worms in the jungle with gasoline. I got some gasoline and poured it on myself. I counted the worms when they started to slip out. There were 40 on my arm. I remained there but I wanted to leave. I didn't want to take the boat because I didn't want to steal it."

Hours later, the lumbermen who used the shelter arrived and tended to her injuries and bug infestations. The next morning they took her via a seven-hour canoe ride down the river to a lumber station in the Tournavista District. With the help of a local pilot, she was airlifted to a hospital – and her waiting father – in Pucallpa.

Aftermath:
“I had nightmares for a long time, for years, and of course the grief about my mother's death and that of the other people came back again and again. The thought Why was I the only survivor? haunts me. It always will.”
—Juliane Koepcke, 2010

The unlikelihood of Koepcke's survival has been the subject of much speculation. It is known that she was seatbelted into her chair and thus somewhat shielded and cushioned, but it has also been theorized that the outer pair of seats – those on each side of Koepcke, which came attached to hers as part of a row of three – functioned like a parachute and subdued the velocity of her fall. The impact may also have been lessened by the landing site's "very thick foliage".

Her experience was widely reported and is the subject of two feature length documentary films. The first was I miracoli accadono ancora (1974) by Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese; it was released in English as Miracles Still Happen (1975) and is sometimes called The Story of Juliane Koepcke. Twenty-five years later, director Werner Herzog revisited the story in his film Wings of Hope (2000). Herzog was inspired to make the film as he narrowly avoided taking the very same flight while he was location scouting for Aguirre, Wrath of God. His reservation was canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.

Koepcke moved to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries. Like her parents, she studied biology at the University of Kiel, graduating in 1980. She received a doctorate from Ludwig-Maximilian University and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy, specializing in bats. Koepcke published her thesis, Ecological study of a bat colony in the tropical rain forest of Peru, in 1987. Now known as Juliane Diller, she serves as librarian at the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich. Her autobiography, Als ich vom Himmel fiel (When I Fell From the Sky), was released on 10 March 2011 by Piper Verlag, for which she received the Corine Literature Prize in 2011

Image: Juliane Koepcke revisited the crash site in 1998 for Werner Herzog’s documentary Wings of Hope