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.
“I was wearing a very short, sleeveless mini-dress and white sandals. I had lost one shoe, but I kept the other because I am very short-sighted and had lost my glasses, so I used that shoe to test the ground ahead of me as I walked.”
Juliane made her way toward the crash site of the plane, where she found a bag of sweets. But once they were gone, she had nothing left to eat and feared she would starve to death.
Having spent time at her parents’ rainforest research station just 30 miles away, Juliane inadvertently learned how to survive on her own.
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Surrounded by dangerous animals and toxic plants, she started making her way to safety—wherever that was.
On the fourth day, Juliane came across three other passengers. Still strapped into their airplane bench, they were “rammed head-first into the earth.”
“I was paralyzed by panic. It was the first time I had seen a dead body. I thought my mother could be one of them but when I touched the corpse with a stick, I saw that the woman’s toenails were painted—my mother never polished her nails.”
Six more days went by. Maggots began filling her wounds, and she was unable to stand properly.
As she drifted along the edge of a river, she came across a large boat.
It wasn’t until she touched it that Juliane realized the boat was real—she wasn’t hallucinating. Just a few yards away sat a liter of gasoline. Remembering what her father did when her dog had maggots, Juliane sucked the gasoline out of the can and poured it into her maggot-infested wound.
“The pain was intense as the maggots tried to get further into the wound. I pulled out about 30 maggots and was very proud of myself. I decided to spend the night there.”
The next day she heard the voices of several men outside.
“It was like hearing the voices of angels.”
After explaining to them all that had happened to her, the men fed Juliane and treated her wounds, then took her back to her father the next day.
More than two weeks after the crash, officials reported they’d found Juliane’s mother’s body. She too had survived the crash, but was badly injured and couldn’t move. She died several days later.
“I dread to think what her last days were like.”
Of the 93 passengers on her plane that day, Juliane was the only survivor.
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Today, more than 40 years since the accident, Juliane carries on her mother’s legacy as a biologist in Germany. Her experience is still one of the most miraculous stories of survival ever to be told.
