Juliane Koepcke

This is a classic jungle survival story that follows the adventure of Juliane Koepcke as she is stranded alone in the Peruvian jungle after a plane crash.

When she was just 17 she and her mother were traveling to the city of Pucallpa to meet her father when the LANSA Lockheed Electra OB-R-941 commercial airliner they were traveling on was struck by lightning at 10,000ft. The plane began to come apart straight away with the pilot doing all he could to decrease altitude as chucks of the aircraft began to peel off.

Koepcke stayed strapped in her seat for the 2-mile descent to the ground and incredibly survived with nothing more than a broken collar bone and a deep cut in her right arm, as well as a number of smaller cuts and bruises.

The plane hit the ground in pieces and she initially decided to look for her mother and any other passengers that might have survived, but this search turned out to be unsuccessful. She did manage to find a stream and as her father taught her, she followed it in the hope it would lead to something.

Before she set off she managed to find some sweets which would be her only safe food source until rescue came. Over the next 11 days, Koepcke waded downstream, being constantly attacked by insects and dealing with a gradually worsening arm injury.

She was unable to sleep during the night as the insects were constantly biting her, producing countless tiny infected bumps and her arm was now infested with maggots.

Luckily on the 11th day, she reached a point where the stream opened into a lake where she found a small shack with a motor boat outside. She recalls something her dad taught her about treating wounds in the jungle and poured some gasoline into the cut, which made the maggots come out. Below is a quote from her taken from an interview in regard to her arm wound.

“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.”

After waiting at the shack for a few hours some lumbermen came who treated her wounds and bug infestations. The next morning had to undergo a seven-hour canoe ride downriver to a lumber station in the Tournavista District. Luckily a pilot was on hand to airlift her to the hospital at Pucallpa where her father was waiting.