The Incredible Story Of Juliane Koepcke, The Teenager Who Fell 10,000 Feet Out Of A Plane And Somehow Survived
Juliane Koepcke
After the crash of LANSA Flight 508, Juliane Koepcke wandered the Peruvian jungle for 11 days before she stumbled upon loggers who helped her.
Juliane Koepcke had no idea what was in store for her when she boarded LANSA Flight 508 on December 24, 1971.
The 17-year-old was traveling with her mother from Lima, Peru to the eastern city of Pucallpa to visit her father, who was working as a zoologist in the Amazonian rainforest. She had received her high school diploma the day before the flight departed and was now planning to study zoology just like her parents.
But suddenly, the hour-long flight turned into a nightmare when a massive thunderstorm rolled in and lightning struck the plane, sending it hurtling downward toward the jungle below. “Now it’s all over,” Juliane Koepcke recalled hearing her mother say.
Then, as the plane began to disintegrate in mid-air, Juliane Koepcke and the seat she was strapped into became detached from the crumbling plane itself. The next thing she knew, she was falling 10,000 feet through the air and into the canopy.
But when Juliane Koepcke finally slammed into the ground, she miraculously survived — and her story of astonishing perseverance wasn’t over yet.
The daughter of two zoologists, Juliane Koepcke was familiar with the jungle from the time she was a little girl.
Born in Lima on October 10, 1954, Juliane Koepcke was the child of two German zoologists who had moved to Peru to study wildlife. Starting in the 1970s, Koepcke’s father lobbied the government to protect the the jungle from clearing, hunting and colonization.
Dedicated to the jungle environment, Koepcke’s parents left Lima to establish Panguana, a research station in the Amazon rainforest. There, she grew up learning how to survive in one of the world’s most diverse and unforgiving ecosystems.
“I grew up knowing that nothing is really safe, not even the solid ground I walked on,” Koepcke, who now goes by Dr. Diller, told The New York Times in 2021. “The memories have helped me again and again to keep a cool head even in difficult situations.”
By “the memories,” Koepcke meant that harrowing experience on Christmas Eve 1971.
On that fateful day, the flight was meant to be an hour long. But just 25 minutes into the ride, tragedy struck.
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