How Juliane Koepcke, 17, survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest after a plane crash
After four siblings were rescued 40 days after being involved in a plane crash in the Colombian jungle, many are in disbelief at how they managed to survive.
However, they’re not the only people to endure treacherous circumstances after being presumed dead in a horror crash.
On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Koepcke, then only 17 years old, was the sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508 en route from Lima, Peru’s capital, to Panguana.
After the plane was struck by lightning and disintegrated in midair, Juliane, still strapped to her seat, fell 10,000 feet into the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.
An intense search was conducted for 10 days before it was abandoned with no sign of flight – but 11 days later Juliane emerged as the only survivor after surviving alone in the rain and being rescued by fishermen.
Juliane Koepcke was just 17 years old when she was a passenger on LANSA Flight 508 from Lima, Peru, to Panguana, after graduating from high school. The plane was struck by lightning as it flew through a thunderstorm on Christmas Eve in 1971 and crashed, killing 91 people, including Juliane’s mother. Pictured: Juliane returns to the 1998 location
The survivor, who now lives in Germany and is a mammalian specializing in bats, remained silent in the media for several years after her rescue, but began telling her story 15 years later when filmmaker Werner Herzog took her to the Amazon rainforest to following in her footsteps in the documentary Wings of Hope in 1998.
Juliane Koepcke (now known by her married name, Diller), is the daughter of zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke. At the time of the crash, she and her parents lived in the Panguana region of the Amazon rainforest, where they had set up a research station.
The night before the fateful flight, Juliane and her mother had attended the high school graduation ceremony of the student in Peru’s capital, Lima. Eager to go home for Christmas, they booked a flight on December 24 with the troubled airline LANSA.
The airline’s safety record was so bad that Hans-Wilhelm urged them to avoid the flight, but it was the only commercial airliner with seats still available.
As the mother and daughter waited to board on Christmas Eve, they found themselves in a packed airport that was overcrowded due to several canceled flights the day before.
Juliane, pictured as a teenager, had just graduated from high school when she boarded the plane back to Panguana, where she lived with her parents
Juliana, pictured with her mother Maria, was raised by her zoologist parents in rainforest Panguana, where she learned about the ecosystem
Writing about her memory of the flight in Reader’s Digest in 2013, Juliane recalled a fairly smooth first 30 minutes of the flight, during which passengers were served snacks.
After a quiet start, however, the passengers soon went berserk when the plane flew into a thunderstorm and could see lightning flashing all around them.
She remembered people screaming and crying around her as the plane was tossed about in the turbulence, with lunchboxes flying around the cabin.
Meanwhile, her mother, who was a nervous flier, tried to comfort her daughter by telling her, “Hope this will work out.”
Describing the moment when the plane was supposedly struck by lightning, Juliane recalled that the plane “drifted” as it fell from the sky, her mother saying, “Now it’s all over.”
As she fell through the air to the Amazon rainforest, Juliane remembered losing consciousness before waking up again, still falling upside down from the sky. She described the vast forest below her as “like broccoli” as she raced toward it.
On impact, she lost consciousness again before waking up at 9:00 AM the next day (her watch was still working). She had suffered deep lacerations, a broken collarbone, an eye wound and a concussion.
When she came to and realized what had happened, Juliane frantically searched for her mother, despite being incredibly weak from the fall. However, Maria had died in the crash and her body was nowhere near where Juliane had ended up.
For the next 11 days, Juliane survived alone in the Amazon rainforest as she hoped to be rescued. Fortunately, she had spent enough time in the woods as a child to have developed a strong knowledge of her dangerous environment.
Juliane now lives in Munich, Germany, with her husband Erich Diller, and works as a mammalian specializing in bats
As she searched for means to keep her going as she tried to get to safety, she found a small spring from which she drank – but the water spring also gave hope that she could find her way out of the woods, and she continued to follow it . for the coming days.
During her journey, Juliane resorted to drastic measures to stay alive.
In 2009 she told CNN the cut on her arm was full of maggots and she was afraid she would lose her arm.
“I still wonder how so many maggots fit in that hole, it was no bigger than a one euro coin,” she recalls.
After coming across a tank of gasoline, she poured it on the wound to disinfect it.
As she continued walking, Juliane also found the bodies of other plane crash victims, many of whom were still strapped to their seats.
“I was shocked — I didn’t want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure my mom wasn’t one of them. So I grabbed a stick and knocked a shoe off one of the bodies. The toenails had nail polish on them and I knew it couldn’t be my mom because she never used nail polish,” she recalls.
When the stream finally turned into a river, Juliane had hope again, but wrote of her anger and despair when she realized that not a single person was in sight.
Desperate for safety, she swam through the treacherous waters, filled with reptiles, piranhas and stingrays, to try to find civilization.
Her deep knowledge of the Amazon taught her that the predatory creatures were unlikely to be in the middle of the river where she swam. However, under the blazing sun, Juliane suffered intense second-degree burns that broke her skin.
With each passing day, having eaten little more than a packet of candy since the crash, she grew weaker and weaker.
After surviving alone for 10 days, Juliane found a small boat docked at what appeared to be a human trail. She described how she used all her strength to climb to shore and follow the path up a slope that took hours to reach a small hut. There was still no one to be seen, so she spent the night there, hoping to be found by humans.
The next day, January 3, 1972, Juliane was finally discovered by three fishermen who found her in the cabin and helped her to safety.
After her rescue, Juliane learned that she was the only surviving survivor of the LANSA crash. A total of 91 people were killed, including her mother Maria.
She went on to help rescue teams locate the wreckage of the plane and the bodies of the victims, before moving to her parents’ homeland, Germany, where she made a full recovery.
In the early years after the crash, Juliane did not speak to the media about her ordeal. However, in 1998 filmmaker Werner Herzog made a film about her experience – a process in which she was involved.
Herzog had long been interested in Juliane’s story because he too was supposed to be aboard LANSA Flight 508, but did not board due to a last-minute schedule change.
Wings of Hope, a documentary about Juliane’s incredible survival story, saw the mammalian travel back to the Amazon for the first time and revisit the crash site.
While flying with Herzog and her husband, Erich Diller, Juliane occupied the same seat on the flight, 19F, that she had been in years earlier when LANSA Flight 508 crashed.
She told the filmmaker how she’s lost faith in pilots since the terrifying incident and “listen[s] out for every sound’ on airplanes now.