Juliane Köpcke
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Juliane Diller Köpcke of Lima, Peru was the sole survivor of 92 passengers in the December 24, 1971 crash of LANSA Flight 508 (a LANSA Lockheed Electra OB-R-941 commercial airliner) in the Peruvian rainforest. She and her mother, famed ornithologist Maria Köpcke, were travelling to meet with her father, biologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke.[1]
The airplane was struck by lightning and exploded in mid air, disintegrating two miles up. Köpcke, who was 17 years old at the time, fell to Earth still strapped into her seat. She survived the fall with only a broken collarbone, a gash to her right arm, and the loss of sight in one eye. She spent 11 days travelling through the jungle without food in search of civilization, finding a hunter's hut on the tenth day and remaining there until the hunter returned.
Her experience is the subject of two films, the first being the 1974 Giuseppe Maria Scotese film "The Story of Juliane Koepcke", and the most recent being the 2000 Werner Herzog film Wings of Hope.
Juliane returned to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries and continued her studies, eventually earning a PhD degree in Zoology, like her parents, in 1987. Now known as Dr. Juliane Diller, she specializes in mammalogy, studying bats.[2]
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[edit] External links
- ^ The Top Wilderness Survival Stories. Outside Online. Retrieved on 2006-08-13.
- ^ Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke Obituary. Retrieved on 2007-01-06.
