The woman who fell out
On Christmas Eve, 1971, LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was caught in a lightning storm and crashed in the Peruvian rainforest. Of the 93 passengers, including her mother, only 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke lived to tell the tale after surviving a tw
IREMEMBER falling. The seatbelt squeezes my belly so tightly that it hurts and I can’t breathe. At that moment it becomes crystal clear to me what is happening. In my ears is the roar of the air through which I’m moving downwards. Before I can even feel fear, I lose consciousness.”
These are the words of Juliane Koepcke in When I Fell From The Sky, describing the accident which changed her life. She continues: “The next thing I remember is hanging upside-down while the jungle comes towards me with slowly spinning movements. The treetops, green as grass, densely packed, remind me of broccoli.”
When she next came to, Juliane was alone in the jungle, underneath her seat and severely concussed with a broken collarbone. Nevertheless, after several attempts she managed to stand and walk. Gradually, over 11 days, she followed a small stream until it reached a larger river and she found safety and rescue at a loggers’ hut.
A very private person, Juliane explains why she has finally spoken about the crash and her trek to safety. “Now I have a kind of anniversary,” she says. “Last year, 40 years had passed since the crash and it was a good time to recall what happened.”
It was not an easy task however. She had to revisit some painful memories and confront the guilt she still feels over the incident in which her mother died.
The two of them had postponed the journey from Lima to join Juliane’s father at his research station in the rainforest near Pucallpa, so that she might attend her school graduation ceremony and ball. The decision meant that there were no seats available with Peru’s reputable Faucett airline, and they had to take tickets on a flight with the less-reliable LANSA.
“There were painful aspects to writing the book, but I am glad I did it,” she says. “It was like therapy for me.”
She still feels intense anger however: “I am sometimes very angry that they allowed the plane to fly because the technician who looked after it normally worked on motorbikes and mopeds.
“I am also sometimes angry that the pilots flew straight into the storm when they could have turned around and landed somewhere else.” Nevertheless, she is pleased to have had the opportunity to tell the story of the crash and her survival in her own words.
The blonde schoolgirl who emerged so improbably from the jungle on January 3, 1972, was besieged by the world’s press and much was written about her that was inaccurate: that she had abandoned other survivors to make her own journey to safety (she saw no one else alive), that she had created a raft of leaves and branches to travel downriver (such a raft would have become waterlogged and sunk, she actually swam and floated), that her wounds had been infested with worms (the result of a mistranslation; they were maggots). When I Fell From The Sky is her opportunity to set the record straight.
Juliane also wishes not to be wholly defined by her improbable survival. The book shifts between her recollections of