Читать книгу Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories - Collins Maps - Страница 18

Two Miles Up without a Parachute

A 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL WAS IN A PLANE OVER THE AMAZON RAINFOREST WHEN IT WAS HIT BY LIGHTNING AND DESTROYED. SHE FELL 3 KM (2 MILES) STILL STRAPPED TO A ROW OF SEATS AND AWOKE IN THE JUNGLE WITH MINOR INJURIES. THE ONLY SURVIVOR, SHE THEN TREKKED THROUGH THE JUNGLE FOR TEN DAYS TO REACH CIVILIZATION.

DATE: 1971 SITUATION: PLANE CRASH CONDITION OF CONFINEMENT: SOLE SURVIVOR IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE DURATION OF CONFINEMENT: 10 DAYS MEANS OF ESCAPE: TREKKING THROUGH THE JUNGLE NO. OF ESCAPEES: 1 DANGERS: FALLING TO DEATH, DISEASE, STARVATION, DEHYDRATION EQUIPMENT: NONE

Amazonian rainforest, Peru.

Home for Christmas

It was Christmas Eve in 1971 and more than anything in the world, 17-year-old Juliane Köpcke was looking forward to seeing her father.

She was travelling with her mother Maria, an ornithologist. The flight in the Lockheed Electra turboprop would take less than an hour. It would leave Lima and cross the huge wilderness of the Reserva Comunal El Sira before touching down in Pucallpa in the Amazonian rainforest where her parents ran a research station in the jungle studying wildlife.

The airline, LANSA, didn’t have the best safety reputation: it had recently lost two aircraft in crashes. The weather forecast was not good. But the family desperately wanted to be together for Christmas, so they stepped on board.

For the first twenty-five minutes everything was fine. Then the plane flew into heavy clouds and started shaking. Juliane’s mother was very nervous.

Falling to Earth

Suddenly there was a blinding flash on the starboard wing and a fraction of a second later, a sickening explosion. The plane instantly started plummeting straight down. Christmas presents were flying around the cabin and people were screaming: it was every air traveller’s worst nightmare.

‘To the right we saw a bright flash and the plane went into a nose dive. My mother said, “This is it!”’

Lightning had hit one of the fuel tanks. The explosion tore the right wing off.

Then, suddenly, there was silence. Juliane realized there was no plane around her any more. She was in the open air, flying, and far below her she could see the jungle. It was spinning. The plane had disintegrated, throwing passengers out into the storm, 3,000 m (10,000 ft) above the Amazon.

Then Juliane blacked out. She fell more than 3 km (2 miles) into the jungle canopy but miraculously survived with only minor injuries.

For the rest of that day and the night, she remained unconscious. She woke the next morning at nine o’clock (she remembers the exact time because she noticed that her watch was still working). As she sat up she realized she was still strapped into her row of seats. And she was completely alone in the jungle.

Her ordeal was just beginning.

Water of life

Rescue planes and search crews scanned the area soon after the plane lost contact with air traffic control. But the region was so vast and remote that they couldn’t find the crash site.

All ninety-one of the other passengers and crew on Flight 508 died. Remarkably, Juliane was relatively unhurt. The row of seats that she was strapped into spun as it fell, much like a helicopter, slowing her rate of descent. She also landed at a place where the jungle canopy had particularly thick foliage. This cushioned her impact with the ground. The only injuries she had were a broken collarbone, a swollen right eye, concussion and some gashes on her arms and legs.

Juliane was an intelligent, resourceful girl. She had also spent years on the research station with her parents. Her father was a practical man who had taught his daughter how to survive in the rainforest. With remarkable foresight he had prepared her for just such an emergency. He had told her that the first thing to do was find a creek and follow it downstream, because that would lead to a stream and the stream would flow into a bigger river where, eventually, there would be a human settlement.

She found a creek and started to wade downstream, but it was tough going.

Searching for her mother

As she travelled downstream, Juliane came across more wreckage – and more bodies. Her discoveries were gruesome. She came upon three women still strapped into their row of seats. They had landed headfirst and the impact had driven them nearly 0.5 m (2 ft) into the ground.

Juliane thought that one of the women might be her mother. Choking back her horror, she had to find out for certain. She couldn’t bring herself to try to pull the body from the ground, so she used a stick to prise one of its shoes off. The dead woman’s toes were painted with nail polish; as her mother never used nail polish, she knew it couldn’t be her.

She kept walking.

At the mercy of the jungle

Juliane continued through the rainforest, wading through the jungle streams. The water was home to piranhas and poisonous fish, but none attacked her. Crocodiles lined the banks of the streams, but again Juliane’s knowledge of the environment helped her: she just walked calmly by the creatures, confident that they generally do not attack humans.

The stream supplied her with ample clean water and a natural path through the dense rainforest. But it gave her no real food. The only sustenance she had was some candy she had found scattered by the wreckage. She also had several open lacerations which were vulnerable to parasites.

After a few days, Juliane became aware of an unusual sensation in one of the cuts on her arm. It felt a bit like an infection, but it became increasingly irritating, as if there was something in the wound. When she looked she discovered that a fly had laid its eggs in the hole in her arm. They had hatched and now maggots were writhing within her flesh. Terrified that she would lose her arm, there was little she could do without proper medical attention.

As each day passed she became weaker and more vulnerable. Was she right to have followed her father’s advice? What if there were no human settlements for hundreds of miles? Maybe she should have waited to be rescued.

But then, on the tenth day, she stumbled out of the jungle and almost tripped over a canoe. There was a shelter beside it, and there she waited.

A few hours later, the lumberjacks who lived in the shelter finished their day’s work and returned to eat and rest. They must have been astonished to see a bedraggled and exhausted young girl in a torn mini-skirt and one sandal sitting in their hut.

Although the cut in her arm was only a centimetre across, medics later removed more than fifty maggots from the hole.

They dressed her injuries and insect bites as best they could and the next morning they took her downstream in their canoe. It took seven hours to reach a lumber station in Tournavista, and from there Juliane was airlifted to a hospital in Pucallpa. Her father was waiting for her.

And after…

Juliane returned to Germany to recuperate and continue her studies. In 1987, she earned a PhD degree in zoology, like her parents. She went on to specialize in mammalogy, studying bats in Munich, Germany.