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How teen girl survived 11 days in the Amazon Rainforest after a plane crash in 1971

Home> Vehicles> Plane news

Published 09:46 24 Apr 2024 GMT+1

How teen girl survived 11 days in the Amazon Rainforest after a plane crash in 1971

Juliane Koepcke knew exactly what to do to ensure her survival.

Prudence Wade

Prudence Wade

What would you do if your plane was hit by lightning, causing you to topple two miles out of the sky and end up alone in the Peruvian rainforest?

Most of us wouldn't have a clue how to survive - but not Juliane Koepcke.

When she was 17, Koepcke was flying with her mother and their plane was hit, taking a nose-dive. Koepcke fell out of the plane, still strapped to the bench she was sitting on.

The year was 1971, and she found herself stranded in the middle of the jungle, having sustained a broken collarbone, a ruptured ligament in her knee and some deep cuts from the fall.

In 2012 she wrote about her experience for the BBC - explaining how her background meant she was fit to survive the jungle.

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"Before the crash, I had spent a year and a half with my parents on their research station only 30 miles away. I learned a lot about life in the rainforest, that it wasn't too dangerous. It's not the green hell that the world always thinks," she wrote.

She might have had the background, but Koepcke wasn't exactly dressed for trekking through the rainforest - she was wearing a sleeveless mini dress, and had lost one of her sandals. It was far from ideal, but she knew exactly what to do.

She found a small creek nearby and followed it, thinking people were most likely to be somewhere near water. While most of us wouldn't dream of actually getting into the water - after all, who knows what alligators and other nasty things might be lurking in there - that's exactly what Koepcke did. She was a smart cookie, knowing that the most dangerous things around were the snakes on land who were camouflaged to look like leaves.

ERNESTO BENAVIDES / Stringer / Getty
ERNESTO BENAVIDES / Stringer / Getty

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It was a horrific 10-day journey, where she had no food other than a bag of sweets to eat, and even encountered bodies from the plane crash.

"By the 10th day I couldn't stand properly and I drifted along the edge of a larger river I had found. I felt so lonely, like I was in a parallel universe far away from any human being," she wrote for the BBC.

Then, she found a boat, and nearby a small hut which had a litre of gasoline inside. Ever the survivor, Koepcke poured the gas on one of her wounds, which had become infested with maggots - knowing it would drive them away.

The next day, people found her and she was rescued. Sadly, her mother's body was found a couple of weeks later.

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Koepcke then returned to her parents' native Germany, and became a mammologist with a specialism in bats.

Featured Image Credit: Wings of Hope/Youtube / Westend61/ Getty
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