It’s burst. She lost consciousness. When 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke regained consciousness, she was airborne. Decades after that fateful 24 December 1971, she recalled how one moment she was still sitting in the plane and the next she was plummeting three kilometres towards the ground. Without a parachute. She should have hit the ground with a force that should have killed her, but did not. She survived, but her real fight for survival was just beginning. She landed in the middle of the vast Amazon rainforest. She did not know where she was, but she knew that there was not a soul for hundreds of kilometres.
She was completely alone. Her mother Marie was sitting next to her a little while ago, but now she was nowhere to be found. Her father Hans-Wilhelm was at the panguana, as they called their research station. They had lived there for three years. He had been expecting them. They should have celebrated Christmas together. He even put up a Christmas tree to give his daughter the atmosphere she would have enjoyed if she had lived in a normal family.
But Juliane didn’t grow up like other children. Maria and Hans-Wilhelm were explorers. She studied birds, he studied animals. They met when he was doing his PhD at the University of Kiel and she was still studying. Their bond remained unbroken even when Hans-Wilhelm completed his PhD in 1947 and moved from Germany to Peru. Maria followed him when she completed her PhD two years later and married him in 1950.
Since then, they have been inseparable. They were colleagues, spouses and parents. Juliane filled their home with tears and laughter in 1954. She travelled with them wherever the road took them, including into the Peruvian rainforest. When they set up their panguana there in 1968, it was so thick with trees and undergrowth that they had to walk to it.
Home for Christmas
In December 1971, Hans-Wilhelm was on it alone. Maria and Juliane were in Lima. Maria, who also drew pictures of native birds for stamps, had business to attend to, while Juliane had to take her final exams at a German high school. True, she could easily have left them behind a few days earlier, but she was not prepared to give up the trip with her classmates and the prom on 23 December. And so she and her mother landed at the airport on the day before Christmas, when everyone wanted to go home.
The crowds were indescribable. People were jostling to get a seat on the plane. Most of the flights to Pucallpa, where they were going, were sold out. There was only room on the Lansa plane. Its reputation was bad. In just over eight years of operation, it had recorded two air accidents and a total of 150 casualties. Its planes were repaired by mechanics who otherwise looked after the motorcycles, and they liked to let more people on board than the rules allowed. But on that pre-Christmas day, it was the only airline that could get them home before the holidays.
They suppressed their uncertainty and overrode it with relief that they were among the lucky ones with a plane ticket. Juliane sat in the 19th row by the window. She loved to fly and she loved to look at the vastness of the jungle below her. She was particularly excited that day. She was looking forward to returning home and to her first Christmas tree in her life.
Even her mother couldn’t dampen her spirits. Ever since she survived a severe storm in a plane, Maria had been afraid of flying. She was tense that day too. The four-hour wait for take-off only added to her fears, but her daughter remained good-natured. She was used to delays in Peruvian planes. When they finally did take off, she enjoyed the view of the mountain peaks they flew over and the snacks they were served. Some of the passengers were already sound asleep, like the fat man who sat next to his mother at the gangway. Everything was as it had always been: the stewardesses were smiling, Mario was anxious, the weather was beautiful.
And then nothing more. About 40 minutes after take-off, the clouds thickened and the wind picked up. Turbulence was normal when crossing from the mountains to the Amazon plain, so Juliane was not worried when it started to shake them. She snuggled down and continued to observe the nature below.
And the shaking was getting stronger by the minute. Soon, raindrops began to whip the plane. The crew reportedly tried to persuade the pilot to return to Lima, but he refused. He had a number of students on board who were returning home for the holidays. He had to get them to their destination. He will have weathered this storm.
Fire, crashes and screams
The storm was getting stronger. About 15 minutes after they entered it, the plane started to bounce. Christmas presents and pieces of luggage flew around the cabin. People were screaming. The pilot was trying to keep the plane upright. Juliane saw lightning through the window. They were hitting the plane. Suddenly she saw a brilliant light coming from the right wing. It was fire.
Now fear was spreading through her too. “I knew it! It’s the end!” her mother cried. Juliane squeezed her hand tightly. She looked at the flames in panic. Suddenly, the plane shook violently. She screamed. They were no longer flying straight, now they were hurtling almost vertically downwards. She never forgot the deafening sound of the engines piercing her ears.
She lost consciousness. She did not see the right wing fly away, nor the left wing fall off. When she regained consciousness, she was in the air. The plane was nowhere to be seen. Neither was her mother. The man who had been sitting next to her at the gangway had disappeared. Juliane was falling alone from an altitude of three kilometres. She was still strapped into her seat, and it was still attached to the airframe, along with the two empty ones.
The belt was pressing against her abdominal cavity. She was breathing heavily. She looked at the jungle below her. It was dark green, like broccoli. It was spiralling in front of her eyes, though it was really Juliane. The two empty seats circled around her as if they were the outer ends of a helicopter propeller.
She was fully aware of what was happening to her, but she was not overwhelmed by fear. She was in shock. Soon she lost consciousness. And then she dreamt. In the first dream, she was flying around a dark room. She was bumping into walls, her ears were ringing as if she had motors in them.
In other dreams, she felt an irresistible urge to wash. She felt dirty, as if her body was sticky and covered in mud. She needed to bathe. In her dream she thought: It’s so easy, just get up and go to the bath. It’s not far.
When she decided in her dream that she was really going to do it, she woke up in real life. She was lying under her row of airplane seats. She was soaked and muddy. It had rained all night. She did not immediately remember this, although she had regained consciousness earlier.
The plane crashed on 24 December 1971 at around 1.30 pm. Juliane woke up about three hours later to lightning, remembered the crash and lost consciousness again. She remained more or less unconscious for the rest of the afternoon and night until she was strong enough to stay awake on Christmas morning.
She tried with all her strength to get out from under the seats that partially protected her from the rain at night. She had a severe concussion. She could not stand, she could only crawl, and the memory of the plane crash came back immediately. She looked around her. “At that moment I realised that I was all alone. My mother was gone, even though I had dropped three seats on the floor. The man sitting in the aisle seat had also disappeared.” She felt “completely helpless and godforsaken, completely abandoned”.
Always find a stream
She saw nothing and no one in the middle of the impenetrable rainforest. There was no wreckage of the plane, but even if it had been lying around, she would not have seen it. She could see nothing out of her left eye, it was too clouded. She could only see to her right through a narrow slit.
Her right shoulder was hurting. It later turned out that she had broken her collarbone, but as the bone did not break through the skin, she did not think she was hurt much. She saw the cut on her shoulder, but she did not think it was anything special. She felt a pressure in her abdomen because of the belt, but no pain. She was too much in shock to feel them. What surprised her the most was the wound on her calf. Not because it was quite deep, but because it wasn’t bleeding.
Yet when she woke up, she didn’t check her condition first. Her first thought was of her mother. She had to find her. Without her glasses, which she had lost “on the way”, and wearing only one sandal, she began to crawl slowly around. She crawled on all fours and called for her. In reply, she heard only her own echo. There was no one there.
She and my mother were extremely close. Later, she couldn’t find the words to describe the feeling of knowing she was no longer with her, but it didn’t touch her. If I survived, maybe she did too, she decided inside herself, slowly got to her feet and started looking for her.
She knew the jungle. She lived there with her parents for three years, before which they explored it together. But back then, they had machetes, knives and guns. She had nothing. They were dressed appropriately, she wore a short skirt, a blouse and one sandal. They knew the area they were walking in, she had no idea where it was.
So she went somewhere. She found an empty row of seats, but no people and no other pieces of wreckage. She did not know that the plane had caught fire and crashed into a hill far from her. She walked on and suddenly heard a strange sound. She followed it.
She discovered a tiny stream, but was delighted to see it as if it were a river. Not because she could drink from it, but because of her father’s words, which came back to her: ‘If you get lost in the jungle, find water. When you find it, follow it down the hill. Even if the stream is small, it will somewhere merge into a bigger stream. It will merge into a bigger one, which will merge into a river. People live by it.”
She did not hesitate to stay where she was, waiting for help, or to follow the water wherever it might lead her. She stepped into the stream and began to walk on the wet bottom. She knew that the Amazon’s waters did not run straight and that their meandering would make it much longer to reach her destination, but she could not take shorter paths. She did not know where she was or where she was going. Her only signpost was a stream. Without it, she would have been able to go round and round in circles among the trees, which looked so much alike.
When night caught her, she picked some large leaves and covered herself with them. She slept leaning against a tree to protect her back. Not that she was afraid of animals that people are usually afraid of, like jaguars and snakes. She was worried about the tiny animals that she could not fight off and that carried diseases.
The mosquitoes stung her mercilessly. She was spared only when it rained, but then the icy raindrops pierced her as if they were needles. She could not protect herself from either the mosquitoes or the rain. She was helpless even against insects. They harassed her during the day and crawled into her ears at night. On fine nights she could hardly sleep because of them, and on rainy nights the cold kept her awake waiting for dawn, when she could continue her journey on the water.
Birds of the Rescuer
Deep under the high canopy, she could hear planes flying across the sky, but none noticed her. She did not know that four days after the crash, rescuers had not even found the crash site, even though everyone, government officials and civilians, were looking for it. They combed the jungle on foot, searched the crash site with boats and watched from planes for anything unusual. But the forest was the same everywhere – an opaque sea of green without a single broken branch.
The sound of the planes kept Juliane hoping that they would find her sooner or later, but she was not prepared to sit and wait. She walked on and came across the wreckage of the plane again. She saw a row of three seats. The passengers were still strapped in. They had flown upside down on the ground and buried themselves about half a metre into the ground. Only their legs were exposed. Juliane looked at them. They were women.
She didn’t know what to do. She had never seen a dead body before, but she had to know: are any of these women her mother? She was terrified. She could not touch her feet, which were sticking out of the ground. She took the stick and turned one foot over. The nails were painted. She is not her mother, it became immediately clear to her. Her mother never painted her nails.
It was only later that she realised what a shock she had been in at the time. How could she have thought that any woman could be her mother when Maria was sitting next to her on the plane, strapped into the seat that held her row? But her mother never left her thoughts. She clung to every shred of hope that she would find her.
Despite her shock, she scanned her surroundings carefully. She found almost nothing useful, apart from a bag of sweets and a Christmas cake. She had not eaten for several days. She put a piece in her mouth. It tasted disgusting. The cake was soggy and muddy. She left it there and went on with the bag of sweets. Later, she deeply regretted her recklessness, but she had no idea at the time that many more days of starvation and torture lay ahead.
On the fourth day of her jungle trek, she heard a piercing and screeching sound, unusual for those places. Juliane was the daughter of an ornithologist and recognised the voice immediately. It was a hoacin bird. She remembered her mother’s words that gypsy curs, as they are also called, live by the rivers. And she was looking for a river.
“This is my solution,” she thought, relieved to finally find people. For the first time, she left her stream and followed the sound of birds through the forest. She had indeed found the river, but not the people. It was too small for them to live alongside it. She had to move on. She stepped into the murky water and waded through the shallows at the edge. Soon the walk became too tiring and dangerous.
In the company of piranhas and crocodiles
The shallows were home to stingrays, whose bites would surely have been fatal to her under the circumstances. But growing up with the explorers, she knew this, so she picked up a stick in the woods and used it to poke at the river bed in front of her. She made sure she didn’t step on anything she shouldn’t have stepped on, but she didn’t.
But soon she was no longer strong enough to walk. She moved to the middle of the river. She swam a little and let the current carry her a little. She shared her living space with the piranhas. She did not care about them. She knew that they were not dangerous in flowing waters.
Here and there she was joined by crocodiles, which usually rested in pairs on the shore. When they saw her, they descended into the river and dived theatrically into the depths near her. She did not panic. She also knew that caimans do not attack people. In fact, they are afraid of them and hide from them in the deep water. In fact, it was quite extraordinary that she had managed to get so close to them. The other wild animals on the shore did not flinch when she swam by.
Now she spent her days in the water, and in the evenings she would swim to the shore, find a tree, lean against it and try to get some sleep. She felt cold, but she could not make a fire. She tried to divert the sun’s rays onto the dragon’s with the glass of her watch, but it failed to light it.
She was too cold at night and suffered from fever during the day. One day, while resting, she scratched her burning shoulders. She saw blood on her palms. Later, it turned out that she had second-degree burns, which are already bubbling. From then on, she tried to retreat into the shade at midday.
She was also concerned about a wound on her right shoulder. It was swollen. She remembered her father’s stories about insects laying eggs in open wounds. The larvae hatch and burrow into the flesh. Now they were gnawing a hole in her shoulder.
She took the ring and straightened it into the wire, but she could not get it deep enough into the hole eaten by the larvae to get them out. She was afraid that they would hurt her arm, but there was nothing she could do. And there was no one who could help her.
She was all alone in the middle of a wilderness that would have killed survivalists far better equipped and skilled than her. And she was growing exhausted. She had eaten her bonbons long ago, she had no other food. She couldn’t stockpile it. She knew that almost everything that grows in the jungle is poisonous. She did not dare to put anything in her mouth, she just drank a lot.
The days passed and the solution was nowhere to be found. Now even the planes were gone. She realised that the rescue had been abandoned and that she was now truly on her own. She did not know that those involved in the biggest rescue operation in Peru’s history had spent ten days searching in vain for the crashed plane before giving up. Often their planes could not take off because of bad weather, or they had to turn back midway to avoid crashing themselves.
Juliane felt completely abandoned. She was increasingly apathetic. She was swimming less and less, and was more and more abandoned to the current of the river that was carrying her with it. She thought of nothing. She moved more instinctively than thoughtfully. She was on the edge of her strength. She was tormented by visions.
The image of an angel
On the tenth day, she swam ashore to rest. She dozed off and woke up, or perhaps briefly lost consciousness and regained consciousness. Then she saw what looked like a boat in front of her. She could have seen it before, but she did not. Now she did not believe it was really a boat. She swam to the unknown object. She touched it and concluded: it really is a boat.
She immediately came to her senses. If there is a boat, there must be people. She looked around and saw a path leading up the steep bank. She made for it, but found it unmanageable. The path was too steep and she was too weak to manage it.
But as much as her body was worn out by ten days of starvation, strain, insomnia, injuries and stress, her will was strong. She struggled for hours up a climb of about two or three metres, and finally climbed down to the plain.
A shack appeared in front of her. It had no walls, just a bottom and poles on which rested a roof made of palm leaves. It was empty, but at least here she was sure there were people around. She decided to wait for them.
She didn’t feel hungry, but she was alert enough to know that she had to eat to survive. But she was no longer able to think sensibly enough to judge what was safe to eat and what was not. She started catching frogs. She chased after them with the last of her strength, but they all got away. Good thing she did. They were poisonous and Juliane knew it. She knew that they coat arrows with them to make it easier to tame prey, but she just didn’t understand it anymore.
Then it collapsed. She lay half-conscious in the middle of the barracks. She could think no more. Much later, she was awakened by voices. “It was as if an angel was approaching me,” she later recalled, looking at the first of the three forest rangers who had entered the hut. She was rescued.
She told them that she had survived a plane crash and spent ten days making her way through the jungle all alone. They could not believe it, but she was in front of them and she was completely exhausted. They poured petrol on her shoulder wound. She did not resist. Her father had already told her that petrol makes the maggots crawl out. The woodcutter crawled about 35 of them out of the wound. In the end, it turned out that there were about 50 of them in one hole.
Now she was not hungry again, but the loggers made her eat something. Then they made her rest. They could not sail at night, so they did not set off until the next morning. They met people on the river. They quickly turned her away in their boats. Juliane’s eyes were so bloodshot that they were convinced she was a forest demon.
They reached their first village after 11 hours. From there, Juliane was flown by small plane to the hospital, where she received first aid. No, she could not avoid the plane, despite her traumatic experience, and she could not avoid retelling her story. She was the only one who could tell the rescuers where to look for the missing plane, and she told them enough to find it.
The scene was horrific, one of them later recalled. Personal belongings were hanging on the trees like Christmas decorations. Bodies were everywhere. Juliane was still lying in her hospital bed when, on 12 January 1973, she heard that her mother’s body had been found. Only then did the loss become real for her. Until then, she had clung to the hope that her mother would turn up somewhere sooner or later, as she had.
The rescuers have indeed found that Juliane was not the only survivor of the plane crash. There were 14 people alive when the plane crash-landed, but none of them made it through the jungle the way Juliane did. They died waiting for help that never came. In the end, the report read: 91 dead, including 6 crew members and 86 passengers out of 87.
Juliane spent a month in hospital before recovering at home. It gnawed at her for a long time: how is it possible that she survived a fall from three kilometres up relatively unscathed? She did some research and found that it was probably a combination of circumstances.
As there was a heavy storm, she was caught in the storm clouds. These clouds are said to push up anything that falls downwards. This may have slowed her descent. It was also a little slower to the ground because it was strapped into a side seat and the row of two empty seats was spinning around it like a helicopter propeller. Her fall to the ground was also cushioned by the dense branches of the tall trees and the strong wrappers underneath. In the end, she fell to the ground at such an angle that she was carried away with only a severe concussion and minor injuries.
The scenes of those days never left her memory, but she did not return to the scene of the accident until 28 years later, when she was taken there by the makers of a documentary about her survival. The wreckage of the plane is still there. Overgrown with greenery, they have merged with the jungle.
A company with a bad reputation
The crash of Flight 508 was the final nail in the coffin of Lansa, an airline founded in Lima at the end of 1963 by the owners and managers of a local bus company. In January 1964, Lansa launched its first aircraft from Lima to seven of Peru’s largest cities, and by 1965, when it concentrated on tourist destinations, it already had six aircraft and one leased.
The acquisitions have left Lansa operating on the financial edge and this has had an impact on safety. Two and a half years after it started operations, it had already recorded its first air accident, when all 43 passengers and 6 crew members died on 27 April 1966 on flight 501 between Lima and Cusco.
What happened? A 36-year-old American pilot made a mistake. His route plan dictated that he should fly over the plain for a while, even if it meant veering off course, and only turn back towards Cusco once he had gained enough altitude to safely fly over the mountain peaks. He flew straight towards Cusco and crashed into Mount Talaula.
The crash was not survivable, the investigators concluded, but the question that puzzled them was: why did the pilot do what he did? He knew the route well, having flown it a hundred and twelve times. He also knew the plane. Perhaps he did not know how heavily weighted it was and that this was the reason why it could not rise high enough to fly over mountain peaks in just 25 minutes? Did he perhaps underestimate their height or miscalculate his own? Eyewitnesses later reported that he had flown so low that they could read the name of the airline on the plane.
Was he fooled by the weather, which was almost ideal that day, and thought he could get through a natural low strait in a mountain range? But even if he did, why did he make the decision he did? Because he was too tired?
The American pilot was told by his employers that he would be on Flight 501, but then the schedule changed. He had to take the evening flight the day before and his colleague would have to deal with flight 501 at 7.40 the next morning. But nobody told him. At 6.30am, when they came to pick him up, he was nowhere to be found. The American had to jump in, even though he had only got home at around midnight and had slept for a maximum of six and a half hours if he had gone to bed immediately on arrival.
Was he in such a hurry that he flew straight to his destination? No one will ever know, but at the time Lansi was ordered to keep his pilots more consistently informed about their flights.
For the next four years, Lansa flew without accidents, but also without a reputation. There were rumours of inexperienced pilots and overloaded planes, but it never ran out of passengers because it was cheaper than its competitors. But that was probably not the reason why 92 passengers and 8 crew members boarded a Lockheed L-188A in Cusco on 8 August 1970 and set off for Lima on Flight 502.
We were due to take off at 8.30, but nothing happened by midday. They did not take to the air until fifteen minutes before three in the afternoon. It was complicated from the start. The take-off was 700 metres too long because the third engine failed during the take-off. Nevertheless, they flew on, climbed to 91 metres and turned left to return to the runway for an emergency landing. But then all four engines apparently failed, as the aircraft suddenly started to lose altitude, touched the hilly ground and crashed.
All 92 passengers on board were killed. More than half were minors. The plane was carrying a group of American students aged 14 to 18, who were returning from a trip to Machu Picchu to spend six weeks on a student exchange in Peru. They were accompanied by teachers, guides and some of their family members, including the daughter of the Mayor of Lima, who joined them on the trip.
None of them survived the accident. Nor were the newlyweds flying on their honeymoon spared, or the two farmers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were killed by a crashed plane. Miraculously, only the 26-year-old co-pilot, student Juan Loo, survived and later recovered. He was found dangling from a tree. He was badly burned but alive.
Investigators concluded that 101 people died as a result of human error. Once the crew realised that the third engine was not working, they should have done things differently than they did, but the outcome would not necessarily have been different. The aircraft was overloaded and poorly maintained. The airline tried to cover this up with falsified documentation.
She had to pay a fine of 100,000 soles and was not allowed to fly for three months. Although she was on the verge financially, she took to the skies again when her sentence was over. Less than five months after 99 people died on board and two on the ground, and about a month after the end of the no-fly zone, a plane with Juliane and Maria Keopcke on board crashed in the Amazon rainforest. The 91 new lives lost during Flight 508 were a drop over the edge. On 4 January 1972, after only eight years of operation, Lansa lost its licence and, bankrupt, immediately ceased flying.
