Juliane’s Not-so Merry Christmas

 

In late 1971 a passenger plane was struck by lightning during a fierce thunderstorm and crashed in the Peruvian rainforest.  Only one of the 92 passengers survived…

But she wasn’t aboard.

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Seventeen year old Juliane Koepcke, daughter of German zoologists, boarded LANSA Airlines flight 500 in Lima, Peru with her mother on Christmas Eve of that year.  The two planned to join Juliane’s father in Pucallpa, a flight of only about an hour aboard the Lockheed Electra turboprop.  The family would be together for Christmas.

Less than halfway through the flight, however, the plane was at 21,000 feet when it encountered turbulence, then was rocked when a lightening bolt suddenly struck one of the aircraft’s fuel tanks.  The explosion blew the right wing off and the plane, thus handicapped, began to nosedive.

One can only imagine the horrified thoughts the women had as they gripped each other and the older Ms. Koepcke said, “This is it…”

Those were the last words Juliane would ever hear her mother say.

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With the failure of structural integrity due to the loss of the right wing, the sound of the wind and the tearing of metal must have been incredible.  Air crash investigators say the plane began to break up as it fell.  The row of seats Juliane was in was shoved out of a hole in the fuselage and tore away from the plane.

Koepcke’s memories of the fall are unclear, but she does recall the incredible silence after leaving the rapidly disintegrating plane and catching glimpses of the rain forest growing nearer and nearer as she spun toward it from a height of 10,000 feet.

Death was flying up to meet her.

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The size and shape of the seats she was strapped into may have presented enough wind resistance to slow her fall some, plus it offered some protection from the thick canopy of trees and vines she fell through, which also helped slow her descent.  Despite the protection the seats afforded her, she still hit the ground hard enough that she was knocked unconscious by the impact.

The teenager awoke to find herself all alone in a world of green.  All alone, that is, except for the row of seats that had most likely saved her life.  She didn’t feel lucky or even particularly thankful at that point though.

She felt helpless and alone.

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Her physical assessment indicated that her left eye was swollen shut and her right nearly so.  Her right shoulder seemed to be broken and she had an inch-deep cut in her left leg as well as a gash in her arm.  She likely had a concussion too, as she nearly blacked out when she tried to get up and remembers her thinking being limited for some time after the accident.

Pretty lucky I’d say, at least for somebody who had just fallen 10,000 feet and landed on the ground.

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As for supplies she was dressed in a fashionable, for 1971, miniskirt and was missing her glasses and one shoe.  She did have the seats but no knife or other way to utilize them to aid in her survival.

She didn’t have the knowledge or training that some of us have that tell us several options that could have helped her.  However, she had spent quite a bit of her life in the jungle with her parents and was somewhat familiar with life there.

And one more thing – Juliane Koepcke had a will to live.

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She remembered a story from her childhood of an expedition that found themselves in the jungle with one member in need of medical help.  While others stayed with the injured party, one young man followed a stream downhill to find the research station where Juliane’s parents were working.

She started to think how she could find help.  She also started walking.

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There were times she had to take to the water to make travel easier and faster.  The waterways were infested with stingrays, caimans (close relative to alligators), and piranhas but she knew piranhas are harmless in flowing water; caimans normally avoid people, and stingrays will move out of the way if poked with a stick.

Simple enough.

She also knew that, if she followed a stream to the river and then followed it downstream she would eventually come across a native fishing village.

Then she found the first dead people.

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Four days after she started her hike out, Juliane happened across a row of seats containing passengers who had fallen from her plane just like she had, except that these people had hit the ground head-first.  She tried to shake it off but one of the bodies looked like it could be her mother.  Then she noticed the toenail polish, and her mother never did that.

She also later found a large chunk of wreckage from the plane and rummaged through it.  The only thing she found that might be useful was a bag of candy and a large Christmas cake.  The cake was sodden and muddy so she left it behind, which she later decided was a mistake.  She said, “stupid idea, but at that moment I didn’t realize I would be in the jungle for so long”.

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Near the mass of wreckage where she found the food, she came across a small spring.  This was what she had been looking for and she started following the flow downhill.  Whenever she lost sight of the water, she would fall back on other things, such as hearing the song of the crested-chicken, a water-loving bird, and noticing growths of bamboo, which also likes water.

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Not being aware of plants that were safe to eat, Juliane went hungry.  She found clean sources of water though, so the hunger wasn’t too bad, but her bigger concern was the fact that some of her injuries began to get infested with maggots.  Worried about blood poisoning but not knowing what to do, she tried to ignore the problem.

Rescue was her priority.

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On the tenth day after the plane crash, Juliane found a boat and a man-made shelter.  She took refuge for the night and, the next morning, three loggers working in the area found her.  They cleaned her wounds with gasoline and took her to a nearby village, where she was flown out to a missionary hospital where she was treated for several months before recovering enough to be released.

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Koepcke was reunited with her father, then moved to Germany to complete her recovery.  Like her parents, she studied biology at the University of Keogh.  She received her doctorate in 1980 and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammology.  She eventually wrote a book, When I Fell from the Sky, about her experience.

 

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