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snowynightOn 24 December 1971, Juliane Koepcke (aged 17) took LANSA Flight 508 with her mother from Lima to Pucallpa, Amazon forest. Her parents were both zoologists who worked in a research station there, and they wanted to spend Christmas together. The plane was struck by lightning mid-flight and began to disintegrate before plummeting to the ground. Still strapped to her seat, Koepcke fell 3,000 m (10,000 ft) into the Amazon rainforest.
She survived the crash with relatively minor injury (a broken collarbone, a deep cut in her right arm, an eye injury, and a concussion) and only woke up the next morning. For the following 11 days, she was stranded alone in the largest tropical rainforest on Earth.
He years in the research station taught her about jungle survival, but she still needed to face a lack of clean water and food, predators and maggot infection in her arm. "Sometimes I would see a crocodile on the bank and it would start into the water towards me, but I was not afraid. I knew crocodiles don't tend to attack humans," she said.
After 10 days, she found a local fisherman's encampment and gave herself rudimentary first aid, which included pouring gasoline on her arm to force the maggots out of the wound. The next day the fisherman discovered her and brought her to the next town. She was the sole survivor of the crash.
I remembered reading about her jungle survival in Reader's Digest, but didn't know what had happened to her afterwards. She returned to Peru and became a zoologist specialized in bats. In 2011, she published her memoir When I Fell From the Sky , which won that year's Corine Literature Prize.
She survived the crash with relatively minor injury (a broken collarbone, a deep cut in her right arm, an eye injury, and a concussion) and only woke up the next morning. For the following 11 days, she was stranded alone in the largest tropical rainforest on Earth.
He years in the research station taught her about jungle survival, but she still needed to face a lack of clean water and food, predators and maggot infection in her arm. "Sometimes I would see a crocodile on the bank and it would start into the water towards me, but I was not afraid. I knew crocodiles don't tend to attack humans," she said.
After 10 days, she found a local fisherman's encampment and gave herself rudimentary first aid, which included pouring gasoline on her arm to force the maggots out of the wound. The next day the fisherman discovered her and brought her to the next town. She was the sole survivor of the crash.
I remembered reading about her jungle survival in Reader's Digest, but didn't know what had happened to her afterwards. She returned to Peru and became a zoologist specialized in bats. In 2011, she published her memoir When I Fell From the Sky , which won that year's Corine Literature Prize.
