Julian Koepcke: The Only Person To Survive A 10,000-Foot Plane Crash In The Peruvian Jungle

When 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded a plane on Christmas Day in 1971, she expected the flight to go smoothly. However, she soon found herself in a wild thunderstorm, falling toward the earth at 45 meters per second. 

Renowned German zoologist and scientist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke and Maria Koepcke gave birth to Juliane in 1954. The couple lived in a biological research station, Panguana, where they studied tropical birds. 

Speaking about growing up in the jungle, Juliane once said, “I learned a lot about life in the rainforest, that it wasn’t too dangerous. It’s not the green hell that the world always thinks.”

The mother and daughter wanted to return to Panguana to spend the Christmas holiday with Hans-Wilhelm. Maria wanted to get to the research station early. But she had to delay the trip because Julaine, like any typical teenager, wanted to attend the Year 12 dance and graduation ceremony.

Hans-Wilhelm was weary of his wife and child using the Lockheed L-188 Electra plane because it had a history of crashes. The Lockhead L-188 Electra is a low-wing airliner powered by four turboprops. 

The zoologist asked his wife and child to find an alternative. However, finding an alternative was hard as Christmas was approaching, so Juliane and Maria bought tickets for LANSA Flight 508. The plane took off from the airport successfully and everything was smooth sailing. 

A flight attendant served the mother and daughter sandwiches, and as they ate, they looked at the rainforest beneath them through the window. However, 15 minutes from where they were to land, things changed. First, the sky turned black. 

Juliane continued, “Bags, wrapped gifts, and clothing fall from overhead lockers. Sandwich trays soar through the air, and half-finished drinks spill onto passengers’ heads. People scream and cry.” 

The plane then took a nosedive toward the rainforest. Juliane recalled her mother saying eerily calmly, “Now it is all over.”  If Maria said anything else, her daughter could not hear her as the horrified screams of other passengers filled the air. 

In a 2022 interview, Juliane said, “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.” The then-teenager was still harnessed to her seat as she had her seatbelt on, and the row of seats twirled in the air as she fell. 

As Juliane slowly lost consciousness, she believed the Amazon trees would be the last thing she saw. However, the universe had other plans for her, as she survived the 3km fall to earth with minor injuries. 

Juliane took in her surroundings and realized she was not safe yet. But after what she just went through, she had no choice but to sleep where she crash-landed. She wrote about it in her memoir, “I lay there, almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night, until the next morning.”

Thankfully, Maria was a passionate animal lover, and she taught her daughter how to identify animals with sound. Juliane, now a biologist, identified bird calls and croaks of frogs. She recalled, “I recognized the sounds of wildlife from Panguana and realized I was in the same jungle.”

The Peruvian rainforest is famous for dangerous animals like the poison dart frog, the Amazonian giant centipede, the Brazilian wandering spider, the green anaconda, etc. Juliane also had to avoid the many poisonous plants in the rainforest, which meant she had limited food options.

Juliane had to free herself from her plane seat. After several attempts, she succeeded and stumbled forward when the seat belt latch came undone. She saw a packet of lollies, and picked it up, then started on a route she hoped would take her home.

While moving through the river, Juliane hoped to find other people, primarily survivors. However, this did not happen for a while. Also, the rainforest was in the middle of its wet season, so it kept raining. 

Four days into her trek, Juliane heard a sound that filled her with dread — the call of the king vultures. King vultures only circle in great numbers around carcasses. 

The passengers were still strapped to their row of seats. It appeared they struck the ground forcefully and became half buried in the earth. One of the passengers was a woman, and Juliane checked her toes to ensure it was not her mother. 

While at the scene, Juliane heard rescue planes searching, but the team could not see her because of the rainforest’s thick canopy. Also, she was starving and weak, sunburned, and there seemed to be no hope. 

Juliane added, “The wind makes me shiver to the core. On those bleak nights, as I cower under a tree or in a bush, I feel utterly abandoned.” But soon, she found her salvation at the bend around the river. 

Juliane recalled her father using petrol on a family pet injury and pouring it over the cut on her shoulder. She said, “The pain was intense as the maggots tried to get further into the wound.”

Juliane said it was like hearing the voice of angels, prompting her to hurry out of the hut. She found local Peruvian fishermen, but they were terrified seeing the dirty, skinny, blonde girl and stopped talking. 

But again, Maria and Hans-Wilhelm taught their daughter an important skill — speaking and understanding Spanish. As a result, Juliane could talk to the men in their local dialect. She told them, “I’m a girl who was in the LANSA crash. My name is Juliane.”

Hans-Wilhem could barely talk when he reunited with his daughter, and they held onto each other in the first moments. The reunion brought hope that Maria might have survived, and the zoologist frantically searched for news in the following days. 

But unlike her daughter, Maria sustained severe injuries, couldn’t move, and passed away several days after. She said, “I dread to think what her last days were like.” 

This made Juliane the sole survivor of LANSA flight 508. Aviation officials listed the cause of the crash as the intentional decision of the airline to ignore the warnings of adverse weather conditions and allow the plane to leave the airport.

Also, in the years after the accident, Juliane had wondered how she became the only survivor. The biologist has developed several theories, including the possibility of the powerful updraft of the thunderstorm slowing her descent. 

Juliane is not the only one to have survived an airplane crash. In 1936, Linda McDonald made it out alive from a Skyways sightseeing plane that went down near Pittsburgh. Like the biologist, she was 17-year-old, and the sole survivor of the ten people on board, including her boyfriend. 

Vesna survived what the Guinness World Record called “the world’s longest fall from an airplane without a parachute.” She fell from 33,330 feet, which equals 10,160 meters and 6.3 miles. 

Bruno served as a medic during the Second World War and used his experience to keep Vesna alive until help arrived. Air safety investigators said the flight attendant survived primarily due to getting trapped by a food cart in the airplane’s fuselage. 

Furthermore, the then-flight attendant’s doctors concluded that her blood pressure caused her to pass out when the plane’s cabin depressurized. As a result, her heart did not burst upon hitting the ground. 

However, Vesna recovered after ten months but had to walk with a limp for the rest of her life. Also, she could not remember the crash or the events in the first month after the incident. 

Vesna later became a national icon after being honored by Josip Broz Tito, the president of her home country, Yugoslavia. She passed away in December 2016 at 66, having lived a full life as a nationalist. 

Juliane graduated in 1980 and later got a doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She returned to Peru for mammalogy research, focusing on bats. In 1989, the biologist married Erich Diller, an etymologist. 

Juliane did this to fulfill her vow to herself during her solitary trek through the rainforest. She revealed in an interview, “On my lonely 11-day hike back to civilization, I made myself a promise. I vowed that if I stayed alive, I would devote my life to a meaningful cause that served nature and humanity.”

Also, Juliane has a deep love for the rainforest. In her words, “The jungle is as much a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash.”