10 Lionhearted Details Surrounding Juliane Koepcke, Who Survived After Falling 10,000 Feet Into The Jungle

6 /10 Heavy Concussion

On the ground, she was lying underneath her seat. At that moment she realized that she had just survived a plane crash. Due to a heavy concussion, it was possible that Juliane had woken up and lost consciousness multiple times before.

She has not strapped to the seatbelt anymore, so she must have disengaged it at some point but couldn’t remember doing it.

The most likely explanation was that the seat had buffered the crash; otherwise, she wouldn’t have survived the landing.

5 /10 Felt No Pain

It was raining, and she lost her glasses. Juliane did not immediately get up and walk. It took her half a day until she could regain enough strength and recover from the concussion.

Later on, she figured out that the differences in pressure inside and outside the plane had turned her eyes blood red.

In that situation, she claimed to have felt no pain at all. No significant injury to her head either; the only problem was the dizziness that didn’t seem to improve quickly enough.

4 /10 Follow The Water

Once she had enough strength, she went out to look for her mother. She would spend an entire day looking until she realized no one else was anywhere near her position.

She crawled all over the place and called out but heard nothing in return. Then in the afternoon, she came across as little well.

She remembered her father once told her that she should follow it if she ever lost in a jungle and found water. A small stream would flow into a bigger one, then into an even bigger body of water where there were people around.

3 /10 King Vultures

Juliane had no problem leaving the crash site. Had she found someone who was injured, she probably would have stayed a little longer.

On her fourth day of wandering to find help, she saw a row of seats drilled into the ground. It was a seat from the plane. The three people strapped to it must have been killed upon impact.

She knew she would come across dead bodies because moments earlier, she heard the sounds of King Vultures, enormous condors that prey on animal carcasses. Either the vultures found a big dead animal or a human corpse nearby.

2 /10 Maggot-Infested Wound

Juliane was not without injuries. She had a broken collarbone, deep cut on the left calf, fractured shin, strained vertebrae in the neck, and torn ACL, among others.

She also developed a lot of scar tissue after being in the water all the time. All those injuries didn’t bother her. The only thing that made her nervous was an open wound in her upper arm, already infested with maggots.

On the tenth day, she found a boat with a barrel of diesel fuel on it. She poured the energy into the wound, forcing some larvae to come out.

1 /10 Voices Of Angels

Late in the afternoon, she noticed that the boat was sitting close to a path leading into the forest. She followed the trail and found a little shack.

She stayed there for two nights, mending her injuries with no help. In the morning, she heard voices coming from the forest. She thought the voices of angles turned out to be of three local men coming to the hut.

Juliane spoke perfect Spanish, so she told them what happened. They also had heard about the crash from the radio. Help found here, at last.

The next day, the three men took her downstream in their boat. They reached a small town in the afternoon, and she was admitted to a local hospital.

A female pilot happened to be in that small town too. She belonged to some missionaries in a village near Pucallpa.

The pilot took Juliane in a two-prop airliner into the home of those missionaries, where she received further treatments.

Juliane only knew later on that of all the 92 passengers on board LANSA Flight 508 on Christmas Eve; she was the sole survivor.