Wings of Hope: How Juliane Koepcke survived a plane crash and 11 days stranded in the Amazon
Juliane Koepcke should be dead.
There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it; if pretty much anyone else in history went through what she went through, they wouldn’t walk away from it at any time in their life. Much less if they went through it at the same age she did, which was 17 years old.
Born in Lima, Peru, to German zoologists, Koepcke decided very early on in her upbringing that she would follow in her parents’ footsteps and study the nature of South America. No one could have possibly expected the terrifying way everything she learned would have been put to the test; however, the day after she graduated from her high school, the Deutsche Schule Lima Alexander von Humboldt.
Her mother, Maria, had attended her graduation ceremony – the two were flying back home to Pucallpa from Lima on LAMSA Flight 508 when their plane was struck by lightning, disintegrating in the air… Maria was the flight’s sole survivor, despite the fact that she had been sucked out of a window and fallen two miles into the thick of the Amazon rainforest. She woke up still strapped to her seat with a concussion, a broken collarbone and a deep gash in her arm.
She spent almost the entire first day of the ordeal still strapped to her seat, trying to find the strength to get up – finally, after leaving herself exposed to the elements and, in particular, the insect bites of the Amazon, she freed herself, and her first priority was locating the crash site, but in her state, she knew that she had to fend for herself or die trying to reach the plane.
She chose to fend for herself.
So, how did Koepcke survive?
Koepcke might not have found the crash site, but she had found a creek. She knew that the creek had to be fed by something and followed it for the next few days. Her only sustenance came from drinking from said creek and hoping it was fresh enough not to harm her… During this time, it became clear that the cut on her arm wasn’t just infected, it was infested – you see, the day spent in the plane seat had left her a sitting duck for the insects of the rainforest.
A botfly had gotten into the wound and laid eggs. They’d hatched, and Koepcke’s forearm was now crawling with maggots. Fortunately, Koepcke hasn’t just found the river that the creek leads to, but a petrol-powered motorboat that nearby lumberjacks used to carry their cargo. In an interview given after she returned home from the experience, Koepcke said, “I remember having seen my father when he cured a dog of worms in the jungle with gasoline. I got some gasoline and poured it on myself. I counted the worms when they started to slip out. There were 35 on my arm.”
After ridding herself of the maggots, she followed the river for nine days until she got to the lumberjack camp – once the workers found her, they patched her up and transported her to a town, where she was airlifted to a hospital and made a full recovery… The ending to this story isn’t entirely happy, though – once she made a recovery, she assisted with the rescue mission, and eventually found the remains of the flight. Over 14 passengers had also survived the initial crash, but they just hadn’t gotten as lucky as Koepcke did.
As if the whole story wasn’t insane enough, Werner Herzog turned Koepcke’s story into the documentary Wings of Hope. Inspired not only by Koepcke’s story, but by the fact that he had been scheduled to be on the same flight as Koepcke until a change of itinerary forced them to cancel it. Herzog became the only person she allowed to make an official film about the experience, saying her part in the film became a form of therapy for her.