Juliane Koepcke

Koepcke's unlikely survival has been the subject of much speculation. It is known that she was belted into her seat and thus somewhat shielded and cushioned, but it also has been theorized that the outer seats of the row—those on each side of Koepcke, which remained attached to hers as part of a row of three—functioned as a parachute and slowed her fall. The impact may have been lessened further by a thunderstorm updraft and the thick foliage at her landing site.

Now known as Juliane Diller, she serves as librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. Her autobiography, When I Fell From the Sky (German: Als ich vom Himmel fiel), was released on 10 March 2011 by Piper Verlag, for which she received the Corine Literature Prize in 2011. In 2019, the government of Peru awarded her the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services, in the degree of Grand Officer.

Twenty-five years later, director Werner Herzog revisited the story in his film Wings of Hope (1998). In 1971, while location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, ironically, Herzog would have been on the same flight as Koepcke, but for a last-minute change of his itinerary. Koepcke accompanied him on a visit to the crash site, a journey she described as "a kind of therapy" for her.

She moved to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries. Like her parents, she studied biology at the University of Kiel and graduated in 1980. She received a doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy, specializing in bats. Koepcke published her thesis, Ecological study of a bat colony in the tropical rain forest of Peru, in 1987.

Having been widely reported, Koepcke's experience is the subject of one feature-length fictional film and one documentary. The first was the low-budget, heavily-fictionalized, I miracoli accadono ancora (1974) by Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese; it was released in English as Miracles Still Happen (1974) and sometimes is called The Story of Juliane Koepcke. In that film, she was portrayed by British actress Susan Penhaligon.

After recovering from her injuries, Koepcke assisted search parties in locating the crash site and recovering the bodies of victims. Her mother's body was discovered on 12 January 1972.

Koepcke was born in Lima, Peru, in 1954 to German parents who worked at the Museum of Natural History, Lima. She was the only child of biologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke and ornithologist Maria Koepcke. When Koepcke was fourteen, her parents left Lima to establish Panguana, a research station in the Amazon rainforest. She became a "jungle child" and learned survival techniques. Educational authorities disapproved and Koepcke was forced to return to the Deutsche Schule Lima Alexander von Humboldt to take her examinations. She passed the examinations and graduated on 23 December 1971.

Maria, Julaine's mother, was working in Lima when Koepcke was about to graduate from high school. Maria had wanted to return to Panguana on 19 or 20 December 1971, but Juliane wished to attend her graduation ceremony on 23 December. Maria agreed for Juliane to stay for longer and, instead, they scheduled a flight on Christmas Eve. All flights were booked, aside from one with Líneas Aéreas Nacionales S.A. (LANSA). Her father Hans-Wilhelm urged Maria to avoid flying with the airline, which had a poor reputation. They booked the flight, nonetheless.

Juliane Koepcke (born October 10, 1954), also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German Peruvian mammalogist. As a teenager in 1971, Koepcke was the lone survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon rainforest.