Julianne

Imagine for a moment sitting around a table some evening sipping coffee with friends and someone suggests that everyone relate their most unusual experience. Perhaps Brittany talks about a car crash she was involved in and how she was rushed to the emergency room and ended up with a broken arm, and everyone nods in concern at her ordeal. Or Jim tells about, while in the Navy, sneaking out to an off-limits island -- it was a French possession and we weren't friends of the French back then -- and how he ended up getting robbed at knife point, and "Boy, it was a good thing I had ten dollars stuck in my shoe" so he could hire a fishing boat to get back to the Newfoundland coast and safety. Jim tells this story with such humor, that everyone smiles in appreciation.

Julianne

Then it is Julianne's turn. Shy Julianne. "Well yes, let's see! I once fell out of an airplane without a parachute and crashed into the jungle and wandered eleven days without food with a broken collar bone and concussion until I was rescued by loggers."

I would imagine there would be silence around the table, until someone gently says, "Julianne, we are telling true stories, not something we make up."

Julianne murmurs, "Yes. Oh yes. It was true."

Indeed it was.

On Christmas Eve of 1971, 17 year old Julianne Koepcke was flying with her mother to Pucallpa, Peru to meet her father. The plane flew through a storm and was struck by lightning and exploded. There were 91 people on the plane, including her mother, that instantly perished. Inexplicably, Julianne was ejected from the plane still strapped to her seat. She plummeted 10,000 feet (which is 3.2 kilometers for my Canadian friends) toward the Peruvian jungle.

I cannot imagine the horror of that descent. To know that you had seconds to live had to be a terror that we just can't comprehend. Her glasses were ripped from her face, and a shoe was blown off during her plummet.

How did she survive? Perhaps the jungle canopy helped break the fall. It is speculated that she fell through the sky back first with the seat helping to buffer the descent. All that we know is that she survived the slam into the jungle floor, suffering a concussion, a broken collar bone, and cuts and bruises on her face and arms.

Julianne, a high school senior studying in Peru, wanted to be a zoologist. Her parents were both scientists. Her father, Hans-Wilhelm was a biologist and her mother, Maria, was an ornithologist. Julianne had traveled to various research posts in the jungle with her parents as she grew up, so she wasn't a stranger to that environment.

After some time, grateful to be alive, she struggled out of her still buckled seat belt, and searched for the wreckage of the plane. She was searching for her mother, but she found no identifiable remains. She did find parts of the wreckage, and in the twisted metal, came across some candy which she scooped up. Then she had to make a plan.

She was in the middle of nowhere and she knew that she had to find civilization. Her knowledge of the jungle was beneficial and she knew her best chance of survival was to find a river, because people lived along rivers.

Dazed, with one eye swollen shut, near-sighted because she had no glasses, only candy for food, no ability to make fire, without any survival equipment, walking barefooted on one foot, and a collar bone broken, she headed through the jungle in search of a river. Within days she stumbled upon a creek. She followed the flow of the creek for she figured it would have to meet up with a river. And it did.

She again followed the flow of the river. Her candy had long since run out and she foraged as best she could for food. Her only choice for water was to drink from the murky river. She would travel along the bank of the river, and when the jungle became too dense she would wade down the river. For days she kept traveling girded only by her stubborn determination to find civilization. She knew that somewhere there had to be people and she refused to give up.

Julianne, as an adult, revisits the crash scene

After eleven days of this hell she stumbled on a make shift lumber camp. Isolated. No people. She dragged herself to the center of the camp and fell to the ground almost comatose from exhaustion. The next day loggers returned to camp to find her asleep on the ground in a fetal position. They immediately tended to her, applying what little first air they could. They gave her water and food and poured gasoline on her infected wounds. They then loaded her into a canoe and traveled for seven hours further down the river to the Tournavista District lumber station. There a local pilot airlifted her to a hospital, and her father, in Pucalipa.

Of the 92 people on LANSA Flight 508, 17 year old Julianne  Koepcke was the only person to emerge from the jungle alive.

Julianne and her father moved to Germany where she completely recovered from her ordeal. She later went on to get her PhD in zoology. Julianne Diller, her married name, is now the librarian at the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich.

She wrote a book of her experience, When I Fell From the Sky which was released earlier this year and it received the Corine Literature Prize. In 1974 a documentary was produced called Miracles Still Happen. In 2000, the documentary, Wings of Hope, was released.