Planes, trains and automobiles are all incredible forms of transportation that we use today. (It’s also a 1987 classic film, but that’s beside the point.)
It never fails to amaze me that somehow we take something like an airplane, that weighs hundreds of thousands of metric tons, and can control it to soar thousands of feet IN THE AIR. Then again, I never was very good at physics.
Juliane Kopecke was flying over the Peruvian rainforest with her mother when their plane was struck by lightning on Christmas Eve 1971.
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After being delayed more than seven hours for their trip home to the jungle, everyone on the plane was antsy and ready to return for holiday celebrations. That’s when aggressive turbulence changed things forever.
“After about 10 minutes, I saw a very bright light on the outer engine on the left. My mother said very calmly, ‘That is the end, it’s all over,’” Juliane recalls. “Those were the last words I ever heard from her.”
The plane went into a nose-dive and the engine’s roars overtook the sound of people screaming and crying.
“Suddenly the noise stopped and I was outside the plane. I was in a free-fall, strapped to my seat bench and hanging head-over-heels. The whispering of the wind was the only noise I could hear.”
As she fell toward the rainforest where she’d been homeschooled by her parents for the past year and a half, Juliane lost consciousness and remembers nothing of the impact.
But the next day, she woke up.
“I shouted out for my mother, but I only heard the sounds of the jungle. I was completely alone.”
Her injuries consisted of a broken collarbone and some deep lacerations to her legs, along with a ruptured ligament in her knee. Considering she’d fallen more than two miles out of the sky, it was a miracle she was even alive, let alone the fact that she could walk.