It was Christmas Eve, 1971, and the cabin smelled of pine and damp wool. Somewhere among the wrapped presents and the holiday cakes balanced on laps, a seventeen-year-old girl in a sleeveless mini-dress sat beside her mother, watching a wall of black cloud swallow the window. Minutes later she would be falling through the open sky of the Peruvian Amazon, still buckled into her seat, two miles above the rainforest.

Her name was Juliane Koepcke. By the time she walked out of the jungle eleven days later, she had become the sole survivor of one of the strangest, most haunting air disasters in history — and a young woman who, alone and badly hurt, used what her biologist parents had taught her to stay alive.

This is the story of how she fell from the sky and lived. It is the first in our series on the most astonishing survivors of aviation accidents — and few are harder to believe than hers.

A Storm No One Should Have Flown Into

Juliane had every reason to be happy that morning. The day before, 23 December, she had graduated from the German school in Lima. Her mother, Maria, a respected ornithologist, had agreed they could stay in the capital for the ceremony and fly home to the family research station afterwards. By the time they tried to book, almost everything was full. The only seats left were on LANSA — an airline with a poor safety record that Juliane’s father, the biologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, had begged them to avoid.

They flew anyway. LANSA Flight 508 lifted off from Lima around midday, bound for Pucallpa with the Electra’s four turboprops droning over the Andes. For a while it was an ordinary flight. Then the aircraft pushed into a towering bank of cloud, and the ordinary ended.

“There was very heavy turbulence and the plane was jumping up and down,” Juliane later recalled. “Parcels and luggage were falling from the locker, there were gifts, flowers and Christmas cakes flying around the cabin.” Lightning flickered around the wings. Passengers began to cry. Her mother reached for her hand.

Peruvian investigators would later record that the crew pressed on into hazardous weather, apparently under pressure to keep the holiday schedule. After roughly twenty minutes battering through the storm at around 21,000 feet, a bright flash lit the outer engine on the left wing. According to the official findings, the Electra broke apart in the air — the wings overloaded by the storm and the desperate attempt to level out, with a lightning strike widely cited in popular accounts as the trigger. It is often described as the deadliest lightning-related air disaster on record.

Two Miles Down — and Still Alive

What happened next belongs more to physics than to luck, though it needed both. Juliane fell still strapped into a row of three seats. She glimpsed the green canopy spinning up towards her, then blacked out. She remembers nothing of the impact.

She woke the following morning on the forest floor, the rainforest roaring with insects above her. Experts have long speculated about how anyone could survive such a fall. The bench of seats may have spun and slowed her descent; the powerful updraughts inside the thunderstorm may have cushioned her; and the dense, springy jungle canopy may have absorbed the final impact. No single explanation is certain. What is certain is that she came to rest alive, with a broken collarbone, a deep gash on one arm, an eye swollen shut, a torn knee ligament and a concussion — and she was utterly alone.

“I shouted out for my mother,” she said, “but I only heard the sounds of the jungle.” She did not yet know that as many as fourteen other people had also survived the initial crash, scattered across the wreck site, only to die before help could reach them. Among them, it would later emerge, was her mother.

Years later, Juliane returned to the crash site with the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had himself narrowly missed boarding Flight 508 while scouting locations for one of his films. Their journey became the documentary Wings of Hope.

Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, in which Juliane Koepcke retraces her ordeal in the Peruvian jungle.

Following the Water

Juliane had one enormous advantage over almost anyone else who could have fallen there. For a year and a half before the crash, she had lived with her parents at Panguana, the research station they founded deep in the Amazon. She had learned how the forest worked — that it was not, as she put it, “the green hell that the world always thinks.”

One piece of her father’s advice surfaced through the pain and shock: if you are lost in the jungle, find running water and follow it downstream, because moving water leads to bigger water, and bigger water leads to people. She found a small creek and waded into it. Half-blind without her glasses and wearing a single sandal, she used the shoe to prod the ground ahead for snakes as she went.

The days blurred. She ate a bag of sweets salvaged from the wreckage until they ran out, then nothing. She heard search planes pass overhead but the canopy hid her completely. On the fourth day she came upon a row of seats driven into the earth with three bodies still strapped in; she steeled herself to check, with a stick, that her mother was not among them. A wound on her upper arm had become infested with botfly maggots. Remembering how her father had once treated an infested dog, she poured gasoline from a fuel can into the wound and pulled the larvae out one by one.

After roughly ten days of wading downstream, she found a boat moored by a hut and, the next morning, was discovered by a group of Peruvian lumberjacks who tended her wounds and took her by canoe to safety. She had walked, swum and crawled out of the deep Amazon largely on her own.

The Weight of Being the One Who Lived

Survival was not the end of the story. Juliane helped search parties locate the wreck and recover the dead. Her mother’s body was found on 12 January 1972; she had survived the fall too, but died of her injuries while waiting for a rescue that never came in time. The grief, and the impossible question of why she alone walked away, would stay with Juliane for the rest of her life.

She did not retreat from the world that had so nearly killed her. Like her parents, she studied biology, earned a doctorate, and became a mammalogist specialising in bats. In 2000 she took over the directorship of Panguana — the very station whose lessons had saved her. In 2011 she told her own story in her memoir, When I Fell From the Sky.

Her ordeal has been retold in films and documentaries, but it is Herzog’s Wings of Hope — made by a man who escaped the same flight by chance — that comes closest to the truth of it. Below, a documentary account of her eleven days in the rainforest.

A documentary retelling of Juliane Koepcke’s fall and survival in the Peruvian Amazon.

More than half a century on, the facts have lost none of their power to stagger. A teenager fell some two miles out of a disintegrating airliner, woke up alone in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and walked out alive by remembering to follow the water. Of all the survival stories aviation has produced, hers may be the one that most defies belief.

Sources: Wikipedia (LANSA Flight 508; Juliane Koepcke; Wings of Hope); BBC News, “Juliane Koepcke: How I survived a plane crash”; CNN; The New York Times; The Telegraph; ABC News (Australia).