On Christmas Eve 1971,German teenager Juliane Koepcke was sitting next to her mother on a plane. Juliane had just graduated from high school in Lima,Peru,and was on her way to Pucallpa in the Amazon region of Peru,where she and her mother would meet up with her father,biologist Hans Koepcke. But the plane never made it. It was struck by lightning, and when the 17-year-old girl looked out the window,she saw the right wing on tire. The last thing Juliane remembered was feeling herself whirling in her seat in midair and then landing in soft vegetation. She ended up on the ground two miles from the crash.
Juliane lost consciousness,and she came to several hours latter,still strapped in her seat. Miraculously,she had survived,but she had fractured her collarbone,gashed her right are,and lost vision in one eye.And her ordeal was just beginning. She set out to find the plane and her mother,but all she found were some empty seats.And then suddenly she saw the bodies of three young women still in their seats. Of the 92 people on board the plane, Juliane was the lone survivor. Juliane then wandered away from the crash,wearing torn clothes and only one sandal to try to find help.
Juliane had been raised by her parents on an ecological site in the jungle,and s he had had survival training.Although in shock,she remembered her father’s advice about surviving in the jungle:she had to locate flowing water and follow it downstream until the water turned onto a navigable river. Once on the river,she might come across natives or others who could help her. As she waded through jungle water,she fought off swarms of insects and leeches,not even caring when crocodiles dived in her path. She used a walking stick to make her way,prodding shapes in the water to protect herself from lethal sting rays.
Despite her broken collarbone and other injuries,Juliane hacked her way through the rainforest.She frequently heard planes overhead,but she had no way to signal them. She drank water,but she was too stunned to eat anything at all. On the tenth day,she stumbled onto a canoe and hut,where she was found hours later by some Peruvian lumbermen.They tried to treat her injuries.One of them used salt and kerosene to clean out the insects that were burued in her skin. Juliane remembers counting thirty-five worms that came out of her arms alone.The following day she was taken on a seven-hour journey by canoe down the river to the town of Tournavista,where a local pilot flew her to her father,
in Pucallpa.
Julian recovered and went back to Germany,where she became a zoologist. In 1998 she came back to Peru as consultant to Werner Herzog’s documentary about her ordeal,which was called Wings of Hope.