She Fell 10,000 Feet Into the Jungle After Her Plane Broke Apart—and Walked Out Alive

5 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:LANSA was a budget airline that was already infamous for two recent and fatal crashes when its ill-fated Flight 508 took off on December 24, 1971.On board was Juliane Koepcke, a German teen who survived on only water and a bag of candy as she searched for help after her flight crashed into the Amazon rainforest.Koepcke finally found shelter, and several Indigenous lumber workers rowed her to safety, but she still has nightmares about the horrific incident.Juliane Koepcke remembers the moment she regained consciousness amid the wreckage of a plane that had been struck down by a storm and crashed into the understory of the Amazon rainforest. She thought she was still trapped in the nightmare she’d been having.“I had the feeling that my entire body was sticky and soaked with mud,” she told filmmaker Werner Herzog in the 1998 documentary Wings of Hope. “I woke up and found myself under the row of seats completely drenched and covered with mud and earth … at this moment I realized that I had fallen from the sky to the ground.”The German teen had boarded LANSA Flight 508 at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima, Peru, with her mother, ornithologist Maria Koepcke. It was Christmas Eve 1971, and their destination was her parents’ research facility deep in the Amazon. The flight would take less than an hour from Lima to a stopover in Pucallpa before continuing on to its destination at Iquitos. Although LANSA was shadowed by a history of fatal crashes in 1966 and 1970, the airline remained in operation. Staff seemed undaunted that the plane would have to make it through an unpredictable region of the rainforest that was often thrashed by extreme thunderstorms. It was not built for that.Soaring over the Andes proved unproblematic, but the Lockheed L188A Electra, which was meant to handle mid-range flights, soon flew into turbulence. Its designers had not considered something critical when they came up with its body plan in the 1950s. The Electra was notorious for a “whirl mode” flutter caused by insufficiently stiff engine mounts, which led to two fatal crashes in 1959 and 1960. But that problem was corrected by Lockheed’s modification program, and by the early 1960s, the Electra was actually regarded as a rugged aircraft. However, LANSA’s small and aging fleet had not been updated in years and also experienced constant delays. That late December morning was no different, with Flight 508 delayed several hours until it was finally cleared for takeoff around 11:45 am. Past the mountains, when the thick rainforest canopy appeared below, storm clouds rose ahead.The sky went from blue to slate. Huge cumulonimbus clouds rose into the heavens like dark castles, and the plane began to tremble, though this was still seen as normal despite the anxious murmurs of some passengers. Tremors turned into violent shaking as the aircraft was tossed around by intense vertical air currents. Seatbelts clicked into place after a fuzzy announcement over the intercom, and the pilots were determined to push through the dense clouds with nearly zero visibility. Lightning electrified the shadows. Under stress too extreme for them to handle, the plane’s wings were almost ready to give out, when a lightning strike on the right wing ignited the fuel there, causing structural failure. The plane was breaking apart in midair.After the right wing detached from the main body of the aircraft, or fuselage, the rest of the plane was mercilessly torn apart by its uncontrolled descent. Whatever remained was scattered throughout the rainforest when it fell. Fragments of scrap metal, doors, seats, suitcases, and bodies were flung from the aircraft before hurtling into the green abyss, never to be seen again. Peruvian search and rescue teams started to fly out to the remote part of the jungle that had swallowed the L188A Electra, but tangles of leaves and vines made it nearly impossible to make out what had fallen to the ground, which was complicated because the scattering meant there was no single impact site. Authorities were forced to declare that everyone on board was presumed dead.There were no human voices to be heard when Juliane woke. Somehow, the chair she had been belted into had doubled as padding and a shield during her fall. Other passengers were less fortunate. As Juliane searched for her mother, she discovered the legs of several women sticking up from the mud, into which their faces had plunged on impact. Painted toenails revealed that none of them were her mother. Scouring the site for food, Juliane only found a bag of candy and a fruitcake so coated with mud that it was inedible. Remembering her parents’ rainforest survival tactics, the seventeen-year-old searched for water. She eventually found a stream. If she followed the stream, she reasoned it would flow into a river, and rivers often lead to populated areas.Juliane struggled, wading through the muddy waters and trying to sleep on the riverbank in oppressive humidity. Her days were plagued by mosquitoes and her nights by recurring nightmares, and being awake turned into a horror movie scene when one of her wounds became infested with maggots. She had suffered a concussion and often found herself trying to navigate a hazy reality towards a river she only imagined. When she eyed what appeared to be a boat at the bank of a tributary, she thought it was a hallucination until she approached close enough to touch it and feel the wood against her fingers. Searching for any signs of human presence, she saw steps carved up a steep embankment and, despite near-total exhaustion, began to climb.After hours of making her way up on all fours, Juliane found a small hut. Inside was an outboard engine with a plastic tarp under which she found shelter for the night. The next day, she desperately tried to catch frogs to eat, but they kept escaping. It was three lumber workers who finally found her. Led by Marcio Rivera, they doused her wound with gasoline to purge the maggots and used their boat to take her to the nearest village. Her bloodshot eyes initially made the lumbermen fear she was a forest demon. Once taken to safety, she boarded another flight, this time to a hospital in Pucallpa, where she reunited with her father and recovered relatively quickly. She even helped guide search teams back to the crash site within days. Authorities found that up to 14 others had initially survived the impact but perished over the following days awaiting rescue.“Anyone else would have probably stayed at the crash and waited for help,” Juliane, who became a biologist herself and dedicated her life to studying and conserving the rare and varied species of the Amazon, told Herzog. “But for me, it was clear that this was futile.”Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.