Juliane Koepcke survived a Lansa plane crash
Juliane
rests in a Peru hospital with her father by her side after she survived a plane
crash and 11 days in the Amazon. (Instagram:
Juliane Koepcke)
How teenager Juliane
Koepcke survived a Lansa plane crash and solo 11-day trek out
of the Amazon
Posted Sun 2 Oct 2022
Images also from Google
Juliane and her mother
Strapped aboard
plane wreckage hurtling uncontrollably towards Earth, 17-year-old Juliane
Koepcke had a fleeting thought as she glimpsed the ground 3,000 metres below
her.
The trees in the dense
Peruvian rainforest looked like heads of broccoli, she thought, while falling
towards them at 45 metres per second.
A wild thunderstorm had
destroyed the plane she was travelling in and the row of seats Juliane was
still harnessed to twirled through the air as it fell.
She lost consciousness,
assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon trees would be her last.
But then, Juliane woke up.
The jungle canopy was now
above her.
It was Christmas Day 1971,
and Juliane, dressed in a torn sleeveless mini-dress and one sandal, had
somehow survived a 3km fall to Earth with relatively minor injuries.
Walking away from such a
fall bordered on miraculous, but the teen's fight for life was only just
beginning.
She had crash-landed in
Peru, in a jungle riddled with venomous snakes, mosquitoes, and spiders.
Returning to civilisation
meant this hardy young woman, the daughter of two famous zoologists, would need
to find her own way out.
The 'jungle child' raised by
scientists
Born to German parents in
1954, Juliane was raised in the Peruvian jungle from which she now had to
escape.
Her father, Hans-Wilhelm
Koepcke, was a renowned zoologist and her mother, Maria Koepcke, was a
scientist who studied tropical birds.
Together, they set up a
biological research station called Panguana so they could immerse themselves in
the lush rainforest's ecosystem.
Juliane became a
self-described "jungle child" as she grew up on the station.
"I learned a lot about
life in the rainforest, that it wasn't too dangerous," she told the BBC in
2012.
"It's not the green
hell that the world always thinks."
Juliane was homeschooled at
Panguana for several years, but eventually she went to the Peruvian capital of
Lima to finish her education.
In 1971, Juliane and Maria
booked tickets to return to Panguana to join her father for Christmas.
A black and white image of a
hut in the rainforest
Juliane's parents set up a
research station in the Amazon so they could immerse themselves in the local
wildlife. (Wikimedia Commons: Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke)
Her mother wanted to get
there early, but Juliane was desperate to attend her Year 12 dance and
graduation ceremony.
Their only option was to fly
out on Christmas Eve on LANSA Flight 508, a turboprop airliner that could carry
99 people.
Juliane's father knew the
Lockheed L-188 Electra plane had a terrible reputation.
Of 170 Electras built, 58
were written off after they crashed or suffered extreme malfunctions mid-air.
He urged them to find an
alternative route, but with Christmas just around the corner, Juliane and Maria
decided to book their tickets.
The flight initially seemed
like any other.
Placed in the second row
from the back, Juliane took the window seat while her mother sat in the middle
seat.
They ate their sandwiches
and looked at the rainforest from the window beside them.
But 15 minutes before they
were supposed to land, the sky suddenly grew black.
A map of Peru, showing a
flight path from Lima to Pucallpa.
LANSA Flight 508 crashed
just 15 minutes away from its stopover destination, Pucallpa. (Wikimedia
Commons under Creative Commons 3.0)
"Daylight turns to
night and lightning flashes from all directions. People gasp as the plane
shakes violently," Juliane wrote in her memoir The Girl Who Fell From The
Sky.
"Bags, wrapped gifts,
and clothing fall from overhead lockers. Sandwich trays soar through the air,
and half-finished drinks spill onto passengers' heads. People scream and
cry."
Maria, a nervous flyer,
murmured to no-one in particular: "I hope this goes alright".
Juliane recalled seeing a
huge flash of white light over the plane's wing that seemed to plunge the
aircraft into a nosedive.
"Now it's all
over," Juliane remembered Maria saying in an eerily calm voice.
Then the screams of the
other passengers and the thundering roar of the engine seemed to vanish.
"The next thing I knew,
I was no longer inside the cabin," Juliane told the New York Times earlier
this year.
"I was outside, in the
open air. I hadn't left the plane; the plane had left me."
Juliane, likely the only one
in her row wearing a seat belt, spiralled down into the heart of the Amazon
totally alone.
'There was almost nothing my
parents hadn't taught me about the jungle'
On the floor of the jungle,
Juliane assessed her injuries.
Woozy and confused, she
assumed she had a concussion. Her collar bone was also broken and she had
gashes to her shoulder and calf.
"I lay there, almost
like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night, until the next
morning," she wrote.
Without her glasses, Juliane
found it difficult to orientate herself. Her first priority was to find her
mother.
Maria, a passionate animal
lover, had bestowed upon her child a gift that would help save her.
A black and white image of a
woman holding hands with a little blonde girl in the jungle
Maria Koepcke, pictured here
with a four-year-old Juliane, was a German scientist who studied tropical
birds. (Instagram: Juliane Koepcke)
She could identify the
croaks of frogs and the bird calls around her.
"I recognised the
sounds of wildlife from Panguana and realised I was in the same jungle,"
Juliane recalled.
She was not far from home.
But one wrong turn and she would walk deeper and deeper into the world's
biggest rainforest.
"There was almost
nothing my parents hadn't taught me about the jungle. I only had to find this
knowledge in my concussion-fogged head."
Juliane finally pried
herself from her plane seat and stumbled blindly forward.
She found a packet of
lollies that must have fallen from the plane and walked along a river, just as
her parents had always taught her.
Her father had warned her
that piranhas were only dangerous in the shallows, so she floated mid-stream
hoping she would eventually encounter other humans.
The jungle was in the midst
of its wet season, so it rained relentlessly. Everything was simply too damp
for her to light a fire. No trees bore fruit.
"Much of what grows in
the jungle is poisonous, so I keep my hands off what I don't recognise,"
Juliane wrote.
On her fourth day of
trudging through the Amazon, the call of king vultures struck fear in Juliane.
The scavengers only circled
in great numbers when something had died.
The call of the birds led
Juliane to a ghoulish scene.
Three passengers still
strapped to their row of seats had hit the ground with such force that they
were half buried in the earth.
One of the passengers was a
woman, and Juliane inspected her toes to check it wasn't her mother.
"They were polished,
and I took a deep breath. My mother never used polish on her nails," she
said.
Juliane could hear rescue
planes searching for her, but the forest's thick canopy kept her hidden.
She was sunburned, starving
and weak, and by the tenth day of her trek, ready to give up.
"Ice-cold drops pelt
me, soaking my thin summer dress. The wind makes me shiver to the core. On
those bleak nights, as I cower under a tree or in a bush, I feel utterly
abandoned," she wrote.
But around a bend in the
river, she saw her salvation: A small hut with a palm-leaf roof.
Inside, she found a can of
petrol.
The gash in her shoulder was
infected with maggots.
She poured the petrol over
the wound, just as her father had done for a family pet.
"The pain was intense
as the maggots tried to get further into the wound. I pulled out about 30
maggots and was very proud of myself. I decided to spend the night there,"
she said.
The next day she awoke to
the sound of men's voices and rushed from the hut.
The local Peruvian fishermen
were terrified by the sight of the skinny, dirty, blonde girl.
"They thought I was a
kind of water goddess — a figure from local legend who is a hybrid of a water
dolphin and a blonde, white-skinned woman," she said.
A black and white photo of a
girl wrapped in a towel surrounded by adults
Peruvian fishermen put Juliane in their canoe and brought her back to civilisation. (YouTube:
Wings of
Hope )
But Juliane's parents had
given her one final key to her survival: They had taught her Spanish.
"I'm a girl who was in
the LANSA crash," she said to them in their native tongue.
"My name is
Juliane."
Why did Juliane survive?
Over the years, Juliane has
struggled to understand how she came to be the only survivor of LANSA flight
508.
Ninety other people,
including Maria Koepcke, died in the crash. It's believed 14 people survived
the impact, but were not well enough to trek out of the jungle like Juliane.
The cause of the crash was
officially listed as an intentional decision by the airline to send the plane
into hazardous weather conditions.
Juliane later learned the
aircraft was made entirely of spare parts from other planes.
With her survival, Juliane
joined a small club.
Dozens of people have fallen
from planes and walked away relatively unscathed.
A 23-year-old Serbian flight
attendant, Vesna Vulovi, survived the world's longest known fall from a plane
without a parachute just one year after Juliane.
A mid-air explosion in 1972
saw Vesna plummet 9 kilometres into thick snow in Czechoslovakia. She suffered
a skull fracture, two broken legs and a broken back.
But still, she lived. And
no-one can quite explain why.
Juliane has several theories
about how she made it back in one piece.
She wonders if perhaps the
powerful updraft of the thunderstorm slowed her descent, if the thick canopy of
leaves cushioned her landing.
A woman with cropped blonde
hair and glasses smiles at a lectern
Juliane is now a biologist
specialising in bats. She still runs Panguana. (Wikimedia Commons: Cancillería
del Perú under Creative Commons 2.0)
Now a biologist, she sees
the world as her parents did.
In her mind, her plane seat
spun like the seed of a maple leaf, which twirls like a tiny helicopter through
the air with remarkable grace.
The forces of nature are
usually too great for any living thing to overcome. But sometimes, very rarely,
fate favours a tiny creature.
An upward draft, a
benevolent canopy of leaves, and pure luck can conspire to deliver a girl
safely back to Earth like a maple seed.
That girl grew up to be a
scientist renowned for her study of bats.
She still runs Panguana, her
family's legacy that stands proudly in the forest that transformed her.
"The jungle is as much
a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along
the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane
crash," she said.
Posted 2 Oct 20222 Oct 2022,
updated 3 Oct 2022
With affection,
Ruben
