On Christmas Eve 1971, a group of 86 passengers were waiting around frustrated at the airport in Lima, Peru. They were waiting to board LANSA flight 508 to Pucallpa, which was already running seven hours late! Everybody waiting was eager to get home to make it in time for Christmas the next day, including the six crew members who were working on this flight.
This meant that a total of 92 people all just wanted to get home and enjoy the holidays, and this put a lot of pressure on the management at LANSA. So even though they knew that there were going to be some very heavy and potentially deadly thunderstorms along their route, management gave the flight permission to take off anyway.
This would ultimately be one of the most disastrous decisions a company has ever made, and just a few minutes after takeoff the aircraft entered a violent thunderstorm and began to struggle.
Julianne Koepcke was a 17 year old girl who was sitting in the middle seat next to her mother. She had just graduated high school the day before, and just like everyone else she was looking forward to celebrating Christmas with her family.
When the airplane entered the storm clouds the turbulence began to get violent. Luggage was thrown around the cabin, and when people looked out the windows, they could see lightning flashing all around them.
Everybody was terrified of what would happen, and eventually their worst fears were realized when lightning hit one of the engines. The plane went into a nosedive towards the ground, and began to completely disintegrate. The aircraft was falling apart piece by piece, people were being sucked out, and the noise from the engines kept getting louder and louder.
Until suddenly for Julianne Koepcke there was just silence. She had been pulled out of the plane, and she was falling towards the jungle below while still strapped to her seat! She lost consciousness during the fall, and the next thing she remembers is, she woke up the following morning still strapped to her seat in the middle of the jungle.
She had somehow survived a fall of almost 3 kilometers high, and nobody really knows how it happened. But even though she had survived the crash, she now had to survive the jungle. She was stranded all alone, deep inside the Amazon rainforest, without any supplies, and only dressed in a mini dress with one sandal.
On top of that she had suffered a broken collarbone with deep cuts in her right arm and both legs during the fall, and to make matters even worse she was also severely nearsighted and had lost her glasses.
The first thing she did after getting out of the chair was trying to locate her mother and any other people that might have survived, but there was nothing but silence from the jungle.
She did at least find a bag of candy close to where she had crashed which she used for food, and she started walking by feeling ahead of her with her arms and the foot that still had a sandal on it. Frustratingly she could hear rescue planes flying above her, but could never make contact with them through the dense jungle canopy.
After walking for a while she eventually discovered a small river. She waded into the water and let the stream carry her toward what she hoped would be civilization. But the Amazon rainforest is enormous! At the time only about 200.000 people lived in the entire Amazon, which is one person for every 27 square kilometers, so her chances of being found where small to say the least.
For days she had to endure the harsh weather of the Amazon. The temperature would fluctuate from extremely hot during the day, to cold at night, and it rained almost the whole time. She didn't have anything to protect herself with, but since she didn't have any other choice, she had to keep going.
By day 10 she had run out of food and was very hungry. She could barely stand anymore, so she was just kind of drifting down the river, until finally she got lucky again.
She discovered a boat!
This was the first sign that people might be close, and she found a path nearby that led to a small hut with a motor and gasoline. Thinking quickly, she poured the gasoline into her deep wounds which had become infested with maggots by this point! It hurt a lot, but she managed to clean out the maggots, and for once she was able to sleep in a shelter instead of on the jungle floor.
The next morning she finally heard the voice of other people! She left the hut and met a group of loggers, and with that she had been rescued from her ordeal. The loggers gave her food and treated her wounds, took her back to their village, and then got a local pilot to fly her back home, where she was then reunited with her grieving father.
After recovering from her injuries, she volunteered to go back into the jungle with rescue teams to try and locate anybody else who might have survived, but unfortunately nobody else survived the crash.
She ended up being the sole survivor of LANSA flight 508.
LANSA which had already had a terrible reputation before the crash, ironically went out of business on the exact same day that Julianne was found. The Peruvian government eventually concluded that the intentional flight into hazardous conditions was the cause of the crash.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this survival story!