Juliane Diller’s mother had booked herself and her daughter seats in the penultimate row of Lansa flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru, to reunite with her husband for the Christmas holidays. Diller was sitting next to the window, so when a bolt of lightning struck the plane’s right-hand wing, she had a clear view.
She describes seeing a gleaming white light around the outer of the two wing-mounted engines. When the plane lurched forward, her row of three seats dislocated from its mounting and she could see all the way down the aisles as it nosedived to the ground. It was 24 December 1971, and she could make out the shapes of Christmas presents and boxes with festive panettone cakes as they tumbled from the hand-luggage compartment. She heard her mother next to her say, “Now it’s all over” in an oddly calm voice, “as if it came from another world,” says Diller.
The next moment, she was outside the plane, and could sense that her mother was no longer sitting next to her. Beneath her she could see an expanse of different shades of green. “In that moment it was crystal clear to me that I was falling from the sky. I was in freefall. And that’s when the film cuts out”.
The black box would later show that the plane, an 86-passenger Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, had broken apart at about 12:45pm, 15 minutes before it was due to land in Pucallpa in north-eastern Peru, and that Diller was plunging into the rainforest from a height of 3,000 metres.
Diller’s mother, Maria Koepcke, had been nervous about the flight before takeoff. “She never enjoyed flying,” says Diller, speaking on a video call from her home in Puchheim, near Munich, Germany. “She always said for such a metal bird to be flying in the sky was unnatural”. As a professional ornithologist, this was not a casual observation – birds of the natural world were her passion. Maria and her husband (and Diller’s father), Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, worked together on biological, zoological and ornithological research. In 1968, they had persuaded their employers at the Natural History Museum in Lima to allow them to embark on a novel five-year field research project, systematically mapping the fauna, flora and food chains in a remote, 1.8km sq stretch of rainforest. They christened the conservation outpost Panguana, after the local name of the undulated tinamou, a partridge-like bird that fascinated Maria.
Diller had been more relaxed about flying. She had recently turned 17, and asked her parents to delay the flight until 24 December so that she and her mother could stay in Peru to attend her end-of-school prom and graduation ceremony. But she was looking forward to spending her three-month summer holidays at the outpost in the jungle, located a three-day boat journey from Pucallpa, along the Rio Yuyapichis. She knew and loved the area, having spent a year and a half there while her parents set up camp, before returning to Lima to finish her schooling. “I had feared it would be a dark jungle, but it was a sunny, idyllic forest by the river”.
Diller regained consciousness an hour after she had fallen from the sky. She was lying, soaked in mud, underneath the same row of seats she had sat on inside the plane. Its propeller-like movement during the fall probably slowed down her descent and cushioned her from the impact on the rainforest canopy. Miraculously, she sustained no major injuries other than concussion, a broken collarbone, a cruciate ligament tear in her left knee and a gash on her upper arm that was deep but not bleeding.
But if Diller’s field of vision had been clear when the plane had broken apart mid-air, it was now seriously impaired. Not only had she lost the glasses she had worn since she was a child, but one of her eyes was completely swollen shut while the other was narrowed to a thin slit. The first time she tried to stand up, she blacked out.
She could, however, still hear, and the sounds of the rainforest began to sound oddly familiar. From the din, she could make out different species of cicadas, some of which emitted a permanent drone-like buzz while others were chirping. She recognised the dit dit dit of the poison dart frog, whose secretions Indigenous tribes use in their arrows. She heard antbirds, which follow the highways of woodcutter ants along the jungle floor. And, when dusk came, she recognised the melancholy call of the undulated tinamou. Another miracle: she had fallen to the ground about 50km from the area of Peruvian rainforest that her parents had studied more closely than anyone before them.
“The chances of this happening were extremely low: the plane could have crashed over the sea, over the snow and ice of the Andes, or over the dense and treacherous montane forest to its east. All of those would probably have spelled certain death.” In this part of the jungle, Diller had a sliver of a chance.
The odds of survival were still stacked against her. Contrary to how they are depicted in Tarzan films or adventure stories, most rainforests are not exotic larders brimming with food for human consumption, especially in the rainy season. Palm fruits grow directly under the forest roof, at a height of 20 metres, and would have required cooking. Diller did not touch the mushrooms she saw growing on trees, because she suspected them to be poisonous. Near her crash site, she found a box of panettone, but the rain had turned the Christmas cake into an inedible mush. She also found a bag containing about 30 citrusy boiled sweets, and she allowed herself to suck on four a day. This was the only solid food she consumed over 11 days in the jungle.
Overhead, Diller could hear the engines of rescue planes searching for crash survivors, but she realised they would not find her among the thicket of the forest. She knew she had to move, but where to? The green roof over her head was almost completely closed, making navigating by the sun or the stars impossible. “Even if you aren’t shortsighted, every tree in the rainforest looks the same. You walk a metre in one direction and when you turn around you can’t tell which direction you came from.”
After stumbling in a daze around the crash site for a few hours, Diller suddenly heard a dripping sound. In the undergrowth, she discovered a small stream of water coming out of the soil. “That was the moment I developed something like a strategy.” She remembered what her father had told her to do if she ever got lost in the jungle: “If you find moving water, then don’t let it out of sight. The stream will take you to a brook, the brook will take you to a river, and there you will find civilisation”.
Wearing only a sleeveless, colourfully patterned minidress she had saved up to buy for her prom night, and one shoe, Diller soldiered on. She moved slowly, putting down her trainered foot first, to avoid stepping barefoot on spiked brambles, red ants, or mud-dwelling stingrays, which she knew could give you blood poisoning. With her eyesight still impaired, she heard the river before she saw it, recognising the wheezing calls of the chicken-sized hoatzin birds that nest on the banks of large rivers.
In fact, the banks of the river she was following were brimming with wildlife: howler monkeys, brocket deer, and yacaré caimans that slid into the river whenever she approached. This was a bad sign: “You don’t see animals like this close to human civilisation. Deep down I knew that, but I didn’t want to accept it. I just stuck to my mantra that I had to get out of here.”
The river wound its way through the jungle in tight bends. A week on from her fall, Diller had run out of sweets and was living off only water. The minerals in the sediment she was swallowing made her feel sated, but she was beginning to grow weak and apathetic. She was now spending most days in the water, letting herself drift in the stream. On the 11th day, she was resting on a sandbank when she suddenly realised that right in front of her was a boat. “I thought, now you have gone crazy, you’re hallucinating.”
The boat belonged to five men, hunters and woodcutters, who had only sheltered here because a downpour had taken them by surprise. When they stepped out of the forest, she told them her name was Juliane and she had been on the Lansa flight that had crashed over the jungle. The men told her they had thought she was a mythical hybrid creature that is half river dolphin, half blond human being. “I saw that I was saved, but it didn’t seem real until they started talking to me.”
The way Diller felt after her rescue reminded her of the way she had felt after her end-of-school exams. “You spend months preparing for that moment, but when you finally manage it you fall into a kind of void.” When the men told her on the way to the hospital that the crashed plane had not been found, her hope for her mother’s survival dwindled. The remains of Maria’s body were found on 12 January. Juliane was the only one of 92 people on the plane who had survived the crash. It’s the deadliest aviation disaster caused by lightning in history.
In Peru, her rescue from the jungle turned her into a saint-like celebrity; journalists were waiting for her wherever she went, and when people recognised her in the street, some asked to touch her. Urged by her father, she moved to his native Germany, where she could live a quieter life. For years, throughout the 1970s and 80s, she declined to be interviewed, and asked friends and colleagues not to talk to her about what happened. She was reluctant to step on to a plane again, and partially due to political instability and threats of terrorism, she did not return to Peru for 14 years.
“For a long time, I repressed what that fall into the jungle did to me,” she says. “It wasn’t that I felt guilt: I didn’t think it was me who caused my mother’s death by asking her to take a later flight. But, as the sole survivor of an accident, you keep returning to the question: why me? Why was I so privileged that I survived and others couldn’t?”
In 1998, she got a call from the film-maker Werner Herzog, who told her he wanted to make a film about her, in part because he had nearly booked himself on to the same Lansa flight while scouting for his 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Diller was an admirer of the Munich-born director’s films and so she agreed to return to the crash site for the first time. “Herzog was very merciless with himself and his crew; what mattered to him was first and foremost the film,” she recalls. “But he let me talk, almost as if I was talking to myself.”
Making the film, released in 1998 under the title Wings of Hope, became a therapeutic and galvanising experience for Diller. When her father died two years later, she decided to commit herself to continuing her parents’ fight to document and protect the biodiversity of Panguana.
As director of the Panguana Foundation, she successfully lobbied for the Peruvian government to recognise a section of the rainforest as a private conservation area and secured sponsorship that enabled the protected territory to grow from the original 1.8 km sq to 26 km sq. Diller and her husband, Erich, an entomologist, return to the region for a month at least twice a year, working closely with the local Indigenous people to ensure the forest’s continued protection. Illegal gold-mining, which pollutes the river with the large amounts of mercury used to separate the precious metal from the mud, is a growing problem, as are droughts: many of the kind of small streams that guided Diller to safety now commonly dry out during the dry season.
“If the plane hadn’t crashed, I may have gone on to study biology like my parents anyway, but I wouldn’t have had such an intense relationship with the jungle”, says Diller. “Some people think jungles are hostile environments, a green hell. But for me it was the opposite: it saved my life.”