The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

On Christmas Eve in 1971, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke LANSA Flight 508 with her mother in Lima, Peru. They were flying to spend the holidays with her father, a zoologist, who was waiting for them at his research station deep in the Amazon rainforest. Juliane had just graduated from high school the day before, and she was in spirits, wearing a sleeveless mini-dress and a single sandal — the other had slipped off somewhere in the chaos of boarding.

Roughly thirty minutes into the flight, the plane a violent thunderstorm. Passengers watched in horror as lightning struck the right wing, and the aircraft began to in mid-air. Juliane, still strapped to her seat, was out of the fuselage and two miles straight down into the dense canopy below. Miraculously, the thick vegetation her fall, and she regained consciousness the next morning, still fastened to her row of seats, with a broken collarbone, a concussion, a deep on her arm, and her right eye swollen shut.

She was the survivor of the 92 people on board.

Juliane had one advantage that almost no other crash victim would have had: she had grown up in the jungle. Her parents had taught her, from a young age, how to read the rainforest — which insects to fear, which plants were safe, and, , that running water would eventually lead to civilisation. Remembering her father's words, she began to crawl through the until she located a small stream.

For the next eleven days, she downstream, sometimes up to her waist in water. She had nothing to eat but a small bag of sweets she had from the wreckage, and she quickly ran out. The tropical sun her exposed skin, mosquitoes her relentlessly, and maggots began to the open wound on her arm. At night, she curled up on the riverbank and tried to sleep despite the terrifying sounds of the jungle around her.

She occasionally came across the bodies of other passengers — including, at one point, a row of three seats containing women who had fallen just as she had, but had not been as . She forced herself to keep moving, knowing that stopping would mean certain death.

On the tenth day, utterly exhausted and barely able to stand, she upon a small hut belonging to a group of local lumberjacks. There was no one inside, but she found a tin of petrol. Using a technique her father had once demonstrated, she poured the petrol into her infected wound to kill the maggots — an but effective remedy. She spent the night in the hut, too weak to go any further.

The following afternoon, the lumberjacks returned. They were understandably to find a half-naked, severely sunburnt teenage girl covered in insect bites, speaking fluent German. They fed her, treated her wounds, and the next day transported her by canoe to a nearby town, where a pilot flew her to a proper hospital.

Her father was waiting there. He had , like everyone else, that she was dead.

Juliane later went on to study biology, eventually earning a doctorate, and she much of her career to conservation work in the very rainforest that had nearly killed her — and then saved her. In 1998, the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had missed the same flight due to a last-minute schedule change, made a documentary about her story called ‘Wings of Hope’.

She still flies, she says, though she always sits by the window.