Sole Survivors Of Airline Crashes

On August 4, 2014 by Tim Newman

2) Juliane Diller

Diller, born Juliane Koepcke, 1954, was a German biologist born in Peru. Both of her parents were zoologists and Diller intended to follow in their footsteps. Aged 17 she took a flight with her mother to Pucallpa to visit her father when her plane entered an electric storm.

The craft was 3.2 km above the ground when it was struck by lightning and disintegrated into separate parts. Diller was strapped into her seat as she fell to the jungle floor a couple of miles below.

Miraculously Diller survived with just a broken collarbone, a gash to her right arm and her right eye swollen shut. She initially looked for other passengers but could find none. She did find some sweets which would keep her alive, and a freshwater stream. She remembered her father had told her that if you follow a river down stream you would come to civilisation, so that’s what she did.

For 9 days she followed the river, unable to sleep because of insect bites that had become infected. She found a motor boat and poured petrol on her wounds which removed the majority of the maggots from her festering injuries…

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. I remained there but I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to take the boat because I didn’t want to steal it.

A few hours later the guys that used the shelter showed up, tended to her wounds and took her for a 7 hour canoe ride. From there she was helicoptered to hospital and her waiting father.

I had nightmares for a long time, for years, and of course the grief about my mother’s death and that of the other people came back again and again. The thought Why was I the only survivor? haunts me. It always will.

How did Diller survive? It’s quite amazing. The plane seat that she’d fallen to earth in was also attached to a seat either side which is thought to have acted like a parachute. The thick jungle foliage would also have broken her fall a bit.

Werner Herzog the documentarian covered the story in his Wings of Hope film because he himself was supposed to be on that ill fated flight until a last-minute itinerary change saved his life.

Diller moved to Germany, completed her science education and went on to study rain-forest bat species. She now works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich.