Juliane Köpcke

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Juliane Köpcke sitting amid the wreckage of her crashed plane (recreation for film Wings of Hope).

Juliane Diller Köpcke of Lima, Peru was the sole survivor of 93 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 traveling to meet with her father, biologist Hans-Wilhelm Köpcke (Anglicised Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke).^[1]

Juliane Köpcke was a high school senior studying in Lima, intending to become a zoologist, like her father. Her mother was traveling with Juliane from Lima to meet the father who was working in Pucallpa.

The airplane was struck by lightning during a severe thunderstorm 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.

Her first priority was to find her mother, who had been seated next to her on the plane. But her searches proved fruitless - she later found out her mother had died in the crash.

By using jungle survival skills she had previously learned from her father, Koepcke was soon able to locate a small stream. She then waded through knee-high water downstream from her landing site, relying on the survival principle her father had taught her that tracking downstream should eventually lead to civilization. The stream also provided clean water and a natural path through the dense rainforest vegetation. After nine days, she found a canoe, and a nearby shelter, where she waited. Hours later, the lumbermen who resided in the shelter arrived, and tended to her injuries and extensive bug infestations. The next morning they took her via a seven hour canoe ride down the river to a lumber station in Tournavista, from where she was airlifted with the help of a local pilot to her father and a hospital in Pucallpa.

Her experience is the subject of two films, the first being the 1974 Giuseppe Maria Scotese film Miracoli accadono ancora, I (Miracles Still Happen), 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]