Unbelievable. On Christmas Eve 1971, a Peruvian Lockheed L188 Electra, LANSA Flight 508 en route from Lima to the small Amazon jungle city of Pucallpa, came apart in a thunderstorm: A lightning strike ignited a fuel tank, and the fire caused the right wing spar to fail. The four-engine turboprop had been cruising at FL210, and the flaming pieces fell unseen into a 15-square-kilometer area of the tropical void below. There had been 86 passengers and a crew of six. All but one were killed. That sole survivor was a 17-year-old high school senior, Juliane Koepcke, the daughter of a German zoologist and his wife, a Peruvian ornithologist. Juliane’s mother, sitting next to her, died in the crash of LANSA 508 while Juliane’s father awaited them at Pucallpa. Two things were remarkable about the crash: how Juliane survived it, and how she then saved herself from death in the jungle. Koepcke had her seat belt fastened, and when the airplane came apart, she fell, still strapped into the window seat, while her mother and the aisle-seat occupant fell free. Like a maple-seed pod at the end of its winglet, Juliane and the three-seat row helicoptered all the way down and landed in an area of jungle trees interlaced with vines that cushioned her fall. The teenager had broken a collarbone, suffered deep cuts and all but lost her vision, her eyes were so bloodshot and bruised in the fall. Koepcke had spent a good part of her young life with her parents in the backcountry of Peru, and they had taught her survival skills. One lesson was that every rivulet of water flows into a brook, then into a stream, a tributary and eventually into a river. Dressed in a miniskirt and wearing just one sandal, barely able to see, Juliane followed the water. Twelve days later, it led her to Pucallpa. Koepcke’s fall is the subject of a Werner Hertzog documentary, Wings of Hope, which can be viewed on YouTube. #aviation #aviationstories #unreal #airline