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How were your holidays? In 1971, Juliane Koepcke had a shit Christmas Day. She was 17 years old, and the day before she’d fallen 10,000 feet out of the fucking sky and landed in the Amazon. She was all alone and determined to survive.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 5, 1972--
Juliane was born in Peru; her parents worked at the Museum of Natural History in Lima. When she was 14 the family moved into the Amazon rainforest to establish a research station; she learned about jungle survival. I expect she never thought she’d need such skills after being in an airplane that suffered a midair disintegration.
Juliane wanted to spend a few extra days in Lima after finishing high school to attend her graduation before flying back home to the research station. Her mother stayed with her and they caught a Christmas Eve flight on LANSA. Her father had warned her mother that LANSA had a shit safety record, but that’s the flight they booked. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for that lightning storm. Continues below …
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The plane was struck by lightning on the right wing and it began a nosedive. Her mother said to Juliane, “Now it’s all over.” And she was right, for all 86 passengers except her daughter. The aircraft came apart and Juliane fell two miles to Earth still strapped to her seat. She was conscious, and if I know anything about teenage vocabulary she probably yelled Ay, chingados! Ay, mierda! on the way down. Then she passed out.
She awoke Christmas day the sole survivor of the crash, having suffered a broken collar bone, a sprained knee, a concussion, and a few cuts and bruises. One eye was swollen shut and the other barely open. She’d also lost her glasses and couldn’t see for shit. She lay there for a day in the rain.
You know the jokes about how Australia wants to kill you? The Amazon laughs. If you’re in the middle of it there are a thousand different things that can fuck you up before you walk a hundred yards. Venomous spiders and snakes and every manner of bugs and stinging bees and eight-foot gators and don’t step on the stingrays or they’ll fucking tail stab you. Also, motherfucking mosquitos. It was the rainy season, and no fruit was within reach. All she had to sustain herself was a small bag of candy and muddy river water. Nevertheless, she hiked. When she stopped hearing search planes, she thought she was done for. But she hiked.
On January 5, 1972, after 11 days in the jungle she found a lumber camp and poured gasoline on her arm to eliminate a maggot infestation. A few hours later workers found her and returned Juliane to civilization where she was airlifted to hospital. The following week she helped a search party find the crash site. Like her parents, she later became a zoologist working in Peru. Her autobiography, writing under her married name Juliane Diller, is titled When I Fell From the Sky.
Note: The photo is from Juliane returning to the crash site many years later.
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That is one tough woman. Too many people wouldn't have made it out or even attempted it.