Sole survivor of air crash tells her story for the first time

Finally, when it’s already after 11 o’clock in the morning, our flight is called. And when we see the plane, we think it’s magnificent. It’s a turboprop built by Lockheed, model L-188A Electra; in my eyes it looks as good as new. However, it’s far from it, as we’ll later find out.

This type of airplane was actually designed for use in desert regions and had been taken out of service in the United States years ago. Because it has trouble withstanding turbulence — because its wings were, unlike those of 62 other airliners, fastened firmly to the fuselage — a turboprop could not be less suited for a flight over the Andes. It wasn’t new, but assembled entirely from spare parts of other airplanes. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time.

In the airplane we take our seats. Everything is completely normal. My mother and I sit in the second to last row, number 19. I sit by the window as always, seat F. From here I can see the right wing of the plane. It’s a three-seat bench, my mother sits in the middle, and a thickset man takes the aisle seat and falls asleep on the spot.

My mother doesn’t like flying. She often says: “It’s totally unnatural that a bird made of metal takes off into the air.” As an ornithologist, she sees this from a different standpoint than other people. Still, she flew often, especially from Lima to the jungle, as soon as that was possible, for in the end you were saving yourself so many hours of travelling.

The flight from Lima to Pucallpa only takes about an hour. On December 24, 1971, the first 30 minutes are perfectly normal. Our fellow passengers are in high spirits. Everyone is excited about celebrating Christmas at home. After about 20 minutes, we’re served a small breakfast of a sandwich and a drink. Ten minutes later the stewardesses begin to clear up.

And then, all of a sudden, we hit a storm front. And this time it’s completely different from anything I’ve experienced before. The pilot does not avoid the thunderstorm, but flies straight into the cauldron of hell. Broad daylight turns to night around us. Lightning is flashing incessantly from all directions. At the same time an invisible power begins to shake our airplane as if it were a plaything.

People cry out as objects fall on their heads from the open overhead lockers. Bags, flowers, packages, toys, wrapped gifts, jackets and clothing rain down hard on us; sandwich trays and bags soar through the air; half-finished drinks pour on heads and shoulders. People are frightened; they scream and start to cry.

“Hopefully, all will be OK,” my mother says. I can feel her nervousness, while I myself am still pretty calm. Yes, I begin to worry, but I simply can’t imagine that ...

Then I suddenly see a blinding white light over the right wing. I don’t know whether it’s a flash of lightning or an explosion. I lose all sense of time. I can’t tell whether all this lasts minutes or only a fraction of a second: I’m blinded by that blazing light; while at the same time, I hear my mother saying quite calmly: “Now it’s all over.”

Today I know that at that moment she had already grasped what would happen. I, on the other hand, have grasped nothing at all. An intense astonishment comes over me, because now my ears, my head, my whole body is completely filled with the deep roar of the plane, while its nose slants almost vertically downwards. We’re falling fast. But this nosedive, too, I experience as if it lasted no longer than the blink of an eye.

From one moment to the next, people’s screams go silent. It’s as if the roar of the turbines has been erased. My mother is no longer at my side and I’m no longer in the airplane. I’m still strapped into my seat, but I’m alone. Alone. At an altitude of about ten thousand feet, I’m alone. And I’m falling.

In contrast to the noise just a moment ago, the sounds of my freefall are downright quiet. I hear the rushing of the air, which fills my ears. Today I’m not certain whether I remained conscious without interruption; probably not. Presumably, the nosedive in the plane lasted much longer — according to technical calculations, as long as ten minutes. Only after a few weeks am I able to remember it at all. First I experience it in my nightmares, until the memory returns. And to this day, I still don’t know how I could suddenly be outside the airplane.

In his chapter Wings of Hope in the book Voyages into Hell, Werner Herzog wrote, “…she did not leave the airplane, the airplane left her”, and that captures it exactly. I hung strapped into the seat, and around me was nothing.

There has been a great deal of speculation about what exactly happened. Most likely, the airplane simply broke into many pieces after the lightning struck. We were probably sitting at one of the break points, and invisible forces hurled me out in my seat, into the midst of the raging elements. How exactly that happened, and what happened to my mother, I will never learn.

But I remember falling. I’m falling, and the seatbelt squeezes my belly so tightly that it hurts and I can’t breathe. At that moment it becomes crystal clear to me what is happening. In my ears is the roar of the air, through which I’m moving downwards. Before I can even feel fear, I lose consciousness again.

The next thing I remember is hanging upside down while the jungle comes towards me with slowly spinning movements. No, it’s not coming towards me; I’m falling towards it. The treetops, green as grass, densely packed, remind me of heads of broccoli. The images are blurred. I see everything as if through a fog. Then deep night surrounds me again.

I dream . . .

It’s always the same dream. Actually, it’s two, which are interwoven; as in a kaleidoscope, I shift in my sleep from one to the other. In the first of these dreams, I’m racing furiously at a low height through a dark space, incessantly racing along the wall without hitting it. There’s a roaring, humming sound in my ears, as if I myself were equipped with an engine.

In the second dream I have the urgent need to wash myself because I feel completely filthy. I feel like my whole body is sticky and covered with mud, and I desperately need a bath. And then I think in my dream: but that’s easy. All you have to do is get up. Just get up and go to the bathtub. It’s not that far. And at the moment I make the decision to get up in the dream, I wake up.

I realise that I’m underneath my seat. My seatbelt is unfastened, so I must have been awake before at some point. I’ve also apparently crawled still deeper under the sheltering back of the three-seat bench. I lay there almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night, until the next morning. I am completely soaked, covered with mud and dirt, because it must have been pouring rain for a day and a night.

I open my eyes, and it’s immediately clear to me what has happened: I was in a plane crash and am now in the middle of the jungle. I will never forget the image I saw when I opened my eyes: the crowns of the jungle giants suffused with golden light, which makes everything green glow in many shades. This sight will remain burned into my memory for all time, like a painting.

Those first impressions show me a forest like the one I know from Panguana [site of the ecological research station set up by Juliane’s parents]. I don’t feel fear, but a boundless feeling of abandonment. And with excessive clarity I become aware that I’m alone. My mother, who was sitting next to me, is gone. Her seat is empty. There’s also no trace of the heavy man who fell asleep immediately after take-off.

I try to stand up, but I can’t. Everything immediately goes black before my eyes. I probably have severe concussion. I feel helpless and utterly alone. Instinctively, I look at my gold confirmation watch. It’s still working. I can hear its soft ticking, but I find it hard to read the time. I can’t see straight.

After a while I realise that my left eye is swollen completely shut and through the other eye I can see only as if through a narrow slit. On top of that, my glasses have disappeared. Since I was 14, I’ve worn glasses, even though I don’t especially like them. Now they’re gone. Still, I finally manage to read the time. It’s nine o’clock. Going by the position of the sun, it’s morning. I feel dizzy again, and I lie back exhausted on the rainforest floor.

After a while I try once more to stand up. Somehow I get on my knees, but then everything goes black again and I feel so dizzy that I immediately lie back down. I try again and again, and eventually I succeed. Now I discover the injuries I’ve sustained.

My right collarbone feels strange. I touch it, and it’s clearly broken. The two ends have been pushed on top of each other but are not piercing the skin, and it doesn’t hurt at all. Then I find a gash on my left calf, perhaps 1½in long and deep, which looks like a canyon, jagged, as if it had been cut by a rough metal edge. But what’s strange is that it is not bleeding at all.

And then, all of a sudden, I feel anew the absence of other people. No one is there, I know it. My mother isn’t there either. But why? She was sitting next to me! I get down on all fours and crawl around. Search for her. Call her name. But only the voices of the jungle answer me.

When I’m finally standing steadily enough on my feet, I look around. There’s nothing here besides my seat. Up above, beyond the dense treetops, the sun is shining. The thick green canopy of the jungle is completely intact. If an airplane crashed here a few hours ago, then it would have had to cut a swathe through it!

I realise that I only have one shoe on, a white sandal, open at the back and closed at the front. I keep this sandal on, even though later many people will say how ridiculous that was, and they will ask me why I didn’t discard this single sandal, since you can’t walk well with one shoe. Nor is my thin minidress, printed with a colourful patchwork pattern, sleeveless and with a fashionable double-frilled seam, ideal clothing for an expedition.

When I feel around, I find another wound on my upper arm, all the way round the back, where it’s hard to see. Much later doctors will determine that I jarred my neck during the crash and from the resulting spinal injury I still suffer regularly recurring headaches. This also explains why I felt for so long as if I were packed in cottonwool, for it would take days before the dazed feeling completely subsided.

Suddenly I’m seized by intense thirst. Thick drops of water sparkle on the leaves around me, and I lick them up. I walk in small circles around the seat. I’m well aware of how quickly you can lose your orientation in the jungle. Everything looks the same everywhere, and I wouldn’t be the first to get helplessly lost after a few steps.

At first, to my boundless astonishment, I find not a trace of the crash, nothing. No wreckage, no people. Then I discover a bag of sweets and a typical Peruvian Christmas stollen. I’m very hungry and eat a piece of it, but it tastes awful. The hours of rain have softened it completely, and it’s soaked with mud. I leave it where I found it. The sweets, however, I take with me.

All morning and into the afternoon, I stay at my crash site, explore the immediate surroundings and gain strength. I search for other survivors — above all for my mother. I shout as loudly as I can: “Hello! Is anyone there?” In response, there’s nothing but various frog calls, for it’s the rainy season.

And then suddenly I hear the hum of engines. It’s airplanes circling over me. I know immediately what they’re looking for. I look up into the sky, but the jungle trees are too dense. A feeling of powerlessness overcomes me. I have to get out of the thick forest. And then the airplanes leave, and only the voices of the jungle remain.

And suddenly I notice a very particular sound, which has been there all along, from the beginning, but only now penetrates my consciousness. The sound of dripping, tinkling water, a soft burble. Near by, I find a spring, feeding a tiny rivulet. This discovery fills me with great hope. Not only have I found water to drink, but I’m also convinced that this little stream will show me the way to my rescue.

I hear the voice of my father, who said to me time and again: “If you get lost in the jungle and you find flowing water, then stay near it, follow its course. It will bring you to other people.”

So I follow the rivulet, and at first that’s not so simple, because there are often tree trunks that are lying across it this way and that, or dense undergrowth blocking my way. Little by little, the rivulet grows wider and ultimately turns into a stream in an actual bed, which is partly dry, so that I can walk relatively easily along it.

Around six o’clock, it grows dark, and I look in the streambed for a suitable spot, protected at the back, where I can spend the night. I eat another fruit sweet. I have no way to light a fire; even though my father taught me how to do so by rubbing sticks or smashing stones, it’s the rainy season, so everything is soaked. Once the darkness sets in, it is pitch black. Exhausted and alone, I fall asleep. Later on, my nights will be plagued by insects, rain, wind, sleeplessness and despair. But, probably due to my concussion, my sleep that first night is more like a state of oblivion.

****

On the fourth day of my trek, I hear a sound that makes my blood freeze in my veins. It’s the flapping of large wings, louder and lasting longer than that of other birds. Of course, I can only know this because my mother is an ornithologist and she explained it to me, and I hope and pray that she’s not the reason for the presence of the king vulture.

For the cóndor de la selva always goes into action when there’s a great deal of carrion in the forest. And for the first time since I set off on my own in the jungle, I’m horrified. I come around the next river bend, and there I see it. A three-seat bench, just like mine, only this one here is rammed headfirst about three feet into the earth. The heads of the passengers — two men and a woman — are also stuck there in the rainforest floor, only their legs jutting grotesquely upwards.

I force myself to stay and take a closer look at the corpses. They’re still intact, but in the trees sit the king vultures. They’re waiting. A terrible thought crosses my mind. What if it’s my mother? Very slowly, carefully, I approach the corpses. I look at the woman’s feet as if I could recognise by them who it is. I even grab a small stick and with it I turn the foot carefully so I can see the toenails. They’re polished. I breathe a sigh of relief. My mother never polishes her nails.

At the same moment it dawns on me how stupid this is. This woman can’t possibly be my mother, because she was sitting right next to me on the same bench. Why didn’t I realise that right away? I think. And I’m relieved. Later I will feel ashamed.

And then along came the crocodiles

By following a stream that eventually turns into a river, Juliane hopes to reach people. When the riverbanks become too overgrown to navigate, she enters the water and allows the current to carry her.

At one point I sink in the middle of the day on to a sandbank in the river under the glaring sun. It seems to me an ideal place to rest for a bit.

I’ve almost dozed off, hardly noticing any more the ubiquitous black flies on the riverbank that are constantly pestering me. Suddenly I hear a squawk near me that I know; young crocodiles make those noises. When I open my eyes, I see baby caimans, only eight inches large, very close to me. I jump up. I know that I’m in danger.

As soon as the mother of these babies notices my presence, she will attack me. And there she is already, very close. She rises on her legs and comes towards me threateningly. And me? I slide back into the water and drift on. I’ve already had encounters with spectacled caimans that were dozing on the riverbank.

When they noticed me they were frightened and jumped into the water and came towards me. If I didn’t know this jungle so well, I undoubtedly would have gone ashore full of panic and run into the forest, where I would probably have died.

But instead I trust that what I’ve learned in Panguana is true: caimans always flee into the water, no matter what direction they suspect danger is coming from, and they will swim past me or under me, but definitely won’t attack me.

However, the very presence of so many caimans is a sign for me that there are no people living on this river. In time I will learn that the entire river was uninhabited. If I had simply lain down somewhere and stayed there, I would never have been found.

© Juliane Koepcke 2012. Extracted from When I Fell From the Sky (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £10.99) published on March 22. To order a copy for £9.89, including p&p, call 0845 2712134 or visit: thetimes.co.uk/bookshop