How a teen survived 11 days in the Amazon after a plane crash in the ’70s
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At first, Juliane Koepcke paid little mind to the darkening clouds. The 17-year-old watched unfazed from 19F — a window seat, her favorite — as the sky turned from blue to black with about 20 minutes remaining in the Dec. 24, 1971, flight. Soon the plane started shaking, sending suitcases and packages wrapped for Christmas tumbling toward the 92 passengers and crew bound from Lima to Pucallpa, Peru.
A bolt of lightning hit the right wing of the aircraft, and suddenly LANSA Flight 508 was plummeting toward the ground. Over the screams of dozens of others, Koepcke heard her mother say from the seat beside her, “Now it’s all over.”
Then, in what felt like an instant, the Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop plane came apart.
“My mother is no longer at my side and I’m no longer in the airplane,” Koepcke (now known by her married name, Diller) wrote in a memoir called “When I Fell From the Sky.” “I’m still strapped to my seat, but I’m alone. At an altitude of about ten thousand feet, I’m alone. And I’m falling, slicing through the sky …”
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Somehow, she lived. But the plane crash was just the beginning: As the lone survivor of Flight 508, the teenage girl braved 11 days in the Amazonian rainforest before being found — dazed but relatively unscathed — by fishermen. More than 50 years later, her survival story echoed last week, when four children were found alive 40 days after their plane went down in the Amazon.
The siblings, whose ages ranged from 1 to 13, were the only ones to walk away from the May 1 crash that killed three adults, including their mother. Relatives told reporters that the children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous group, got by on cassava flour they found in the wreckage and fruit they plucked from the rainforest. They sought refuge inside tree trunks.
The Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon called their survival an example of a “knowledge and relationship with the natural environment of life,” which it said is “learned from the mother’s womb and practiced from a very early age.”
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Koepcke, too, grew up with a profound appreciation of nature. Her father, Hans-Wilhelm, was a zoologist, her mother, Maria, an ornithologist; the two met as students at Germany’s University of Kiel. Seeking a country with “a high, as yet unexplored biodiversity,” she recounted in her memoir, the young couple made their way to Peru and wed in Lima, saying yes to a life with one other in Spanish: sí.
They raised their only daughter in a home alive with animals. There was a parrot they called Tobias (or “Bio” to a young Koepcke) and a German shepherd mix named Lobo, along with the various wounded birds her mother took in.
For several years, the family lived full-time at a research station the Koepckes founded deep in the Amazon. At Panguana, named after a native bird, the then-teenage girl came to love the jungle, learning the plants and animals that inhabited it and the rules that governed it. Or, as she put it in her book, she “went to the school of the jungle.”
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Panguana was where Koepcke was headed when she boarded the doomed flight, settling into the second-to-last row. As she recounted to Vice in 2010, she and her mother were on their way home to celebrate Christmas with her father after her high school graduation ceremony. The flight was delayed. But once it took off, things seemed to be going smoothly, the stewardesses serving sandwiches midway through.
The dark clouds were the first sign of what was to come.
Koepcke’s mother, who according to the memoir thought it was unnatural “that a bird made of metal takes off into the air,” looked at the sky with unease. “Hopefully this goes all right,” she said. Then came the flash of white light striking the wing and the plane breaking apart, shearing Koepcke away from her mother and everyone else.
“The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,” she told the New York Times in 2021. “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.”
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Hurtling to the ground, Koepcke registered that the densely packed treetops looked like broccoli heads. It was the last thing she could recall thinking before she woke up the next morning on the rainforest floor, her sleeveless dress torn and her glasses missing.
She had a concussion, a broken collarbone, some deep cuts. The forest, she wrote in her memoir, “saved my life,” the foliage cushioning the impact of her 10,000-foot fall. She went in and out of consciousness before finally pulling herself to her feet.
That first day, she searched for her mother and found no one. She realized she was alone.
Then, as she has recalled in multiple interviews over the years, she remembered a bit of wisdom her father had once given her: If you find yourself lost in the jungle, look for water and follow it. You’ll eventually find a larger body of water — and, likely enough, human settlement. Finding water, she trekked on: a girl alone in the Amazon with its snakes and mosquitoes and monkeys and frogs.
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“During my lonely journey back to civilization, I was often afraid, but never of the jungle,” Koepcke wrote in “When I Fell From the Sky.” “It wasn’t its fault that I landed in it.”
At one point, she said in the interview with Vice, she stumbled on a horrifying sight. Rounding a crook of the stream, she spotted a row of seats from the plane with bodies strapped in, their feet pointing up. For the first few moments, she said, “it was like I was paralyzed.”
By the 10th day, Koepcke was near exhaustion. She had eaten only a bag of sweets she’d found at the crash site, and thought she might starve. That afternoon, she found a boat she initially thought was a figment of her imagination. But she touched it and it was real, she told Vice. A nearby path led to a shack. That’s where she was stunned to hear voices the next day — she had been found, at last.
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Soon, she was reunited with her father.
“We didn’t exchange a lot of words,” she told Vice, “but we had each other again.”
Koepcke mourned her mother amid the sudden spotlight over her survival. She went on to study biology in Kiel, later obtaining her doctorate and returning to Panguana to write her doctoral dissertation on bats. After her father died in 2000, she became director of the research station, which she told the New York Times is her “sanctuary,” just as it was for her parents.
Even as she has found meaning in her life and her work, the crash and its aftermath have stayed with her over the decades.
“Of course 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,” she told Vice. “The thought — why was I the only survivor? — haunts me. It always will.”
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Source: The Washington Post
