When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  “Hopefully, this goes all right,” 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 striking there 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 already grasped what would happen. I, on the other hand, grasp nothing at all. An intense astonishment comes over me, because now my ears, my head—no, I myself am completely filled with the deep roar of the plane, while its nose slants almost vertically downward. We’re plummeting. But this nosedive, too, I experience as if it lasted no longer than the blink of an eye. From one moment to the next, the 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 free fall 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, even 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 text “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 much speculation about what exactly happened. Most likely, the airplane simply broke into many pieces after the lightning struck. We probably sat at one of the breaking points, and invisible forces hurled me out in the seat, into the middle 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 seat belt squeezes my belly so tight 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 downward. Before I can even feel fear, I lose consciousness again. The next thing I remember is hanging upside down while the jungle comes toward me with slowly spinning movements. No, it’s not coming toward me; I’m falling toward 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 into 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 have to bathe. 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 realize that I’m underneath my seat. My seat belt is unfastened, so I must have already been awake 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, for 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 already show me a forest like the one I know from Panguana. 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 just sitting next to me, is gone. Her seat is empty. There’s also no trace of the heavy man who fell asleep immediately after takeoff.

  I try to stand up, but I can’t. Everything immediately goes black before my eyes. I probably have a 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 clock. I can’t see straight. After a while I realize 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 fourteen, 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 rain forest floor.

  What I don’t know: The largest search operation in the history of Peruvian air travel has begun. Since the previous afternoon, all Pucallpa has been in extreme excitement. The city center was completely deserted in the afternoon and evening of December 24, because the people besieged the airport and even the runways. After the LANSA plane had disappeared from the radar screen from one moment to the next, shortly after it had sent a last radio message near Oyón, about fifteen minutes away from Pucallpa, it was gone without a trace. Contradictory information confuses and worries the family members. The hope that the plane made an emergency landing somewhere else is abruptly dashed. Eventually they can no longer close their eyes to the fact that the plane is missing, by all indications has crashed in the severe storm, the impact of which was felt all the way to Pucallpa. Heinrich Maulhardt, a friend of our family who was going to pick up my mother and me from the airport, is also among the people waiting. Now he has the difficult job of sending my father the bad news in the distant and inaccessible jungle.

  After a while I try again 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 and are not piercing through the skin, and it doesn’t hurt at all. Then I find a gash on my left calf, perhaps one and a half inches 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’s 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. Not my mother 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.

  7 Alone in the Jungle

  Caña brava, a giant reed, which covers the mouth of the small creek that I followed, where I later showed the rescue team the way back to the crash site, 2010. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  Later the residents of Puerto Inca, a rain forest city only about twelve miles as the crow flies from the spot where I found myself on the ground after the crash, told me that there had been a terrible storm with extremely powerful winds that day. There are people who claim to have heard an airplane circling over the city and then disappearing in the direction of the jungle. Had the pilot considered making an emergency landing in Puerto Inca? I doubt it. For the wreckage was found pretty much exactly on the route the airp
lane normally took. So the pilot did not deviate off course.

  From Werner Herzog, I later learned of the conversations recorded in the cockpit shortly before the crash, for even the black box was eventually found among the wreckage. The pilots chatted about the upcoming Christmas celebration, about their children and families and how they hoped to return to Lima as quickly as possible. Apparently, the deadly thunderstorm had surprised them as much as it had us passengers. The airplane had already begun its final descent toward Pucallpa. I don’t know, of course, whether the pilots had a choice, but in any case they steered the plane directly into the storm.

  There was also a woodcutter in the rain forest during the crash, and he said he heard a loud bang, like an explosion. Later, when the rescue teams are searching for the crashed plane, he will report that to the commander in charge. But they won’t believe him. Too many leads from the population that turned out to be false have made the search teams mistrustful. Is it fate that this very woodcutter, named Don Marcio, will later play a decisive role in my rescue?

  What has most preoccupied me since then, and apparently others too, is the question of how in the world I could survive my plunge from an altitude of nearly two miles with such mild injuries. Even though it would later turn out that I was far more seriously wounded than I perceived after waking up, my injuries were laughable in comparison to the severity of my fall. Besides my collarbone I had broken nothing, and even my flesh wounds were manageable. How could that be? Was it a miracle? Or is there a rational explanation for it?

  In conversation with Werner Herzog, I later thought about three possible explanations, and probably I owe my survival to a combination of all three:

  First of all, it is known that in particularly extensive thunderclouds there are powerful updrafts, which drive everything upward and could conceivably catch and possibly even whirl aloft a falling person. Such updrafts could have cushioned my fall. It was true, after all, that during the brief interval when I was conscious I felt as if the rain forest were coming toward me in circles.

  So I assume that I was simply spinning, just as a maple seed spins as it falls. And the three-seat bench, to one end of which I was fastened by my seat belt, could have worked above me like the little wing on the maple seed that is responsible for this spinning, slowing my fall. On top of that, a man who was involved in recovering the corpses told me that only one very well-preserved seat bench was found, and indeed in a place in the forest over which the giant trees were connected by a dense network of lianas. Perhaps that was “my” seat? Certainly, this tangle of lianas could have cushioned and slowed my plunge. Probably it even ensured that the three-seat bench ended up back under me so that I then fell through the lianas and tree branches as in a boat and landed relatively gently on the rain forest floor. For if I had hit one of the treetops unprotected, I would definitely not have survived the impact.

  All that makes sense. And yet something remains. Something inexplicable. A great wonder. Many people have asked me since, how did it come about that I didn’t die of pure fear during my free fall? The truth is: Strangely, I felt no fear at all. Even as I was plummeting and, fully conscious, saw the jungle whirling under me, I was completely aware of what was happening to me. Perhaps my conscious moments were too brief for me even to become frightened, but I think it’s much more likely that we bear within us a sort of built-in safeguard, which protects us in such extreme moments from going mad with fear or even dying. My experience is: When you are in the midst of a terrible event—and the more horrible it is, the more this is true—you simply let go. The terror comes afterward, as in the tale of the rider who crosses a lake, realizes only after he has safely reached the other side how thin the ice was over which he drove his horse, and drops dead.

  On December 25, 1971, as I awake from my long blackout in the middle of the jungle, I’m still in the midst of the event. Even though I’m fully aware that I’ve fallen out of the airplane, the serious concussion and probably also the deep shock keep me from simply going crazy. On top of that, my parents showed me from an early age that with calm and methodical thinking you could master almost any situation in which you end up in nature. And that’s the case now too.

  I don’t doubt that I will somehow get out of this jungle. My parents already took me with them into the selva when I was a child, and we always came out safe and sound. Now I just have to find my mother. But how will I do that? I still feel as if I’m packed in cotton.

  For someone who has never been in the rain forest before, it can definitely appear threatening. Then it seems like a wall through which green-filtered light falls, with countless shadows varying in thickness. The crowns of the trees are at a dizzying height, making anyone down on the jungle floor feel like a tiny creature. Everything is filled with life, and yet an untrained eye only rarely actually catches sight of a larger animal. There’s scurrying, rustling, fluttering, buzzing, gurgling, clicking, whistling and snarling. For many of the noises, there aren’t even words—and that’s often much more frightening than when all the creatures can be seen. Frogs and birds make the most incredible sounds. If you aren’t familiar with them, you often can’t ascribe them to these animals, and to some people they might even seem malicious and menacing. And then there’s the enormous dampness. Even when it’s not raining, moisture drips down on you constantly, especially in the early-morning hours. The smells of the rain forest are unusual too; often it smells of musty rottenness, of the plants that intertwine and ramble, grow and decay. In these tendrils snakes can sit, poisonous ones and harmless ones, perfectly camouflaged. Often you mistake one for a branch, and don’t even notice it. If you then see it after all, many people are seized with a natural, instinctive terror, which paralyzes them or drives them to flee wildly.

  And, of course, there is a tremendous abundance of the most diverse insects. They are the true rulers of the jungle. Grasshoppers, bugs, ants, beetles and butterflies in the most magnificent colors. And many mosquitoes that like to suck human blood, as well as flies, which lay their eggs under the skin or in wounds. Stingless wild bees, which don’t do anything to you, do, however, like to land in hordes on human skin or cling to your hair, as if stuck to it with glue.

  In the rain forest after the crash, I encountered all this. But my advantage was: I had lived long enough in the jungle to become acquainted with it. My parents were zoologists, and there was almost nothing they hadn’t shown me. I only had to find access to all this knowledge in my concussion-fogged head. Because now it was no longer just something I happened to pick up in passing. Now this knowledge was necessary for my survival.

  That’s also why to this day I still get invited to discussions, to television interviews, even to survival trainings. The most frequently asked question is: “What should you do if you’re in an accident in the jungle?”

  I’m familiar with the Peruvian rain forest, perhaps the Amazon too, but that’s as far as it goes. What should you do to survive in the jungle? Unfortunately, that’s impossible to say in general. Jungles have the peculiarity of being extremely different from one another. Each rain forest is governed by its own laws. Whenever an airplane crashes somewhere, my telephone won’t stop ringing. Fate has apparently made me into an expert on surviving airplane disasters, and so I have to answer questions time and again. When a young woman disappeared in the jungle in the Congo a few years ago, a journalist asked me: “What would you advise her? How should she conduct herself?”

  I had to give a disappointing answer: “I’ve never been in the Congo. I’d have to see on the ground first how things look there, what animals there are, what plants. Every jungle is different.” Besides that, it’s not in my nature to tell other people how they should conduct themselves. I would be the last person to tell this young woman what to do. I know all too well from my own experience that every situation demands new decisions.

  That reporter then twisted my words and wrote that I’d said that if you’re stranded in the jungle in the Congo, you’re h
opelessly lost. That’s what often makes me so angry with journalists.

  Then there was the twelve-year-old girl who was the sole survivor of a Yemeni plane that crashed in July 2009 near the Comoros Islands. She was able to cling to a piece of wreckage in the waves and had to make it through the whole night in the ocean, which I imagine as a terrible ordeal. Many people saw parallels to my story, because she, too, lost her mother in the crash. But that’s where the similarities end. “What would you advise this girl for her life from this point on?” I was asked. In reply, I had to admit that despite my fate I’m an entirely normal person and don’t feel called upon to tell complete strangers how they should now live their lives, just because both of us survived a plane crash. This sort of question bothers me, because I believe no one is entitled to give someone else sage advice.

  But there also have been funny experiences. For example, a journalist from the Süddeutsche Zeitung once called and asked for an interview. He said on the telephone: “You’ll also get a purple orchid as a gift from me.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” I replied, “but you don’t have to do that. Where did you get such an idea, in the first place?”

  He answered: “Well, you like purple orchids so much. I read that on the Internet.”

  And indeed: A young journalist had visited me at my workplace, where there happened to be such plants. In her article she wrote that I seemed to take refuge behind purple orchids and other plants. Sometimes I’m amazed at the imagination of press people.

  Now and then, there are also interview questions about other topics, such as the future of Panguana, which I personally find much more exciting. But most of the time, it’s always only about “that one thing.” Almost everything in my life seems to have to do with the crash; that event has led me so decisively down particular paths.