The Woman Who Survived a 10,000 Foot Fall

When a 17-year old girl celebrated Christmas by falling 10,000 feet from a plane she proved Santa might not need to be packing a parachute.Show more

As far as holiday airport mayhem goes, chances are the 92 occupants (86 passengers and 6 crew) of the propeller powered LANSA Flight 508 flying between the Peruvian cities of Lima and Pucallpa had probably all seen worse.

For some of them, the seven hour wait in the busy airport a day before Christmas might have been the most frustrating thing. Two of said passengers were Juliane Koepcke and her mother Maria, traveling home to meet her father.

At the 40 minute mark of what was supposed to be an hour long flight, Flight 508 hit a thunderstorm in a pitch black sky. As the plane continued further into the storm, its body began to shake violently.

Juliane was in the midst of a 10.000 foot free fall, when she fell unconscious. When she did come around, she was on the ground in dense rain forest, with with a severe concussion and a broken collarbone, a scrape on one arm and a deep gash on her leg, the rest of the plane scattered across almost 6 square miles

Despite being heavily injured and unsuitably dressed for the jungle, the 17-year-old set out to find her mother. With a bag of sweets she found in the wreckage as her only source of food, she struggled to get out of the wreckage. Eventually she stumbled across a group of lumbermen, maggots falling from her open wounds. The men took her to a nearby village, where a pilot flew her to a hospital in a town called Pucallpa, where she was finally reunited with her father.