[WGH]

On Christmas Eve, 1971, 17 year old  Juliane Koepcke and her mother boarded Peruvian LANSA Flight 508 in Lima Peru headed bound for Pucallpa. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane, an 86-passenger Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, flew into a thunderstorm and the right wing was struck by lightning.

During the nosedive the aircraft broke apart, separating her from everyone else onboard. “The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,”  Juliane Koepcke said. “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.”

"As she plunged, the three-seat bench into which she was belted spun like the winged seed of a maple tree toward the jungle canopy. “From above, the treetops resembled heads of broccoli,” She then blacked out, only to regain consciousness — alone, under the bench, in a torn minidress — on Christmas morning. She had fallen some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash."

Juliane hiked 11 days through the dense Amazon jungle until she was found by a local fisherman. Her story was recently featured in the NY Times on the 50th anniversary of her survival.



Werner Herzog was scheduled to take the same flight but a last minute scheduling change saved his life. Herzog was in Puru to scout locations for his classic film "Aguirre: The Wrath of God".

NY Times - She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away
At 17, biologist Juliane Diller was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon. Fifty years later she still runs Panguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/science/koepcke-diller-panguana-amazon-crash.html



The 1998 Werner Herzog documentary goes back into the jungle with Juliane and re-traces her steps from the crash site to her rescue. Her story is beyond amazing.

"Wings of Hope" is available for free on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlJVIcCPIl8

 

[Letitroll98]

Wow, falling 10,000 feet and living, only to be all alone and having to walk out of the jungle.  As a teenager I met a young girl my age who's father was some banana company executive and she grew up in central America.  She had just survived a rafting accident where she and a group had to walk for ten days through the jungle to rescue.  I believe she was back in the states recovering, they had lost some members of the party.  The jungle critters she described made me never want to go to central America.