Thread by @ajcdeane

#Deanehistory 155. Hat tip @SilverAlso. The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 with her mother. She was seventeen.

The flight was from Peru’s capital, Lima, to Pucallpa, a city in the east of the country – they were going to see Julian’s father, a zoologist who worked in the Amazonian Rainforest at Panguana, a research station he had established.

Half an hour into the flight, in deep cloud cover, they experienced increasing turbulence. Luggage compartments flew open. Bags fell out in the aisle and onto passengers. Panic set in… and then lightning struck the engine, and the plane broke up.

Still strapped into her seat, Juliane fell from the plane. She passed out.

She woke up deep in the Peruvian rainforest. She had fallen over 10,000 feet, suffering only minor injuries. Why such miracles happen is impossible to explain.

Perhaps the row of three seats she was in had acted as a kind of parachute? It has been the subject of much speculation.

None of that helped Koepcke at that moment and in these circumstances, though. She had grown up in part at the Panguana station and therefore

had some jungle knowledge and survival skills. But her circumstances were suboptimal.

She was, and I think that we will think this entirely fair, suffering from a certain amount of shock. She also had concussion. She had a broken collarbone and a bad gash on her leg.

Not a soul – whether from the crash or otherwise – was to be seen.

She gauged these circumstances, and passed out again.

Some hours later, she was able to get up. Naturally she looked around her for others, without success. But she did find a small stream, and she knew that she could follow a water downstream – to a bigger body of water, to civilisation, to help.

So she set off following her little stream. Not for an hour or two – for days.

She rested when she needed to, and slept wherever she had got to when she tired. On the fourth day of this, she found the remains of three other passengers.

They were still in their seats – and had landed head first, hitting the ground so hard that they were partially buried.

Upon one of the bodies, Koepcke found a bag of sweets. It was all she had to eat during her entire time in the rainforest.

Carrying on with her journey, Juliane soon saw aeroplanes and helicopters high above her – whilst she could not attract their attention, she knew that their presence meant that people were looking for her or survivors like her.

Looking doesn’t mean finding though. She could still perish as rescuers fruitlessly searched. Their attempts were being stymied by the dense forest foliage: Peru’s authorities couldn’t even find the downed plane,

let alone a solitary little girl limping through the rainforest nursing her broking collarbone.

Koepcke found a hut in a small clearing on her ninth – ninth – day of walking through the rainforest. There was some gasoline in the hut

and she poured it on the open wound on her leg, driving out the maggots that had infested it. She then sat down to rest and, she thought, most likely to die.

But she heard voices, and she wasn’t imagining them.

Three woodcutters lived in the hut, and had found her. Koepcke’s happiness was not initially reciprocated. Her appearance by this point was pretty alarming and the men feared that she could be a water spirit rather than human.

Still, they allowed her to stay in the hut and took her to the closest town the next day in their boat. Thus it was that after eleven days in the jungle Juliane Koepcke was returned to civilisation.

Fourteen other passengers had survived the crash, but died in the jungle before help could reach them. Koepcke was the sole survivor of Flight 508.

This remarkable woman’s resilience is already apparent – but one notes in closing that she recovered from the trauma of this

episode in impressive fashion, went on to start a family, take a doctorate and overcome her quite natural resultant fear of flying to the extent that she was able to return to the site of the crash with Werner Herzog,

sitting in the same seat on the flight she had been occupying on Flight 508 until she fell out of it.