She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away [View all]

[dalton99a]

Last edited Fri Jun 18, 2021, 11:47 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/science/koepcke-diller-panguana-amazon-crash.html

She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away
At 17, biologist Juliane Diller was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon. Fifty years later she still runs Panguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru.
June 18, 2021 Updated 1:06 p.m. ET
By Franz Lidz


Juliane Diller recently retired as deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. “The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,” she recalled. “I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.” Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

On the morning after Juliane Diller fell to earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest dazed with incomprehension. Just before noon on the previous day — Christmas Eve, 1971 — Juliane, then 17, and her mother had boarded a flight in Lima bound for Pucallpa, a rough-and-tumble port city along the Ucayali River. Her final destination was Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, both zoologists.

The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane, an 86-passenger Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, flew into a thunderstorm and began to shake. Overhead storage bins popped open, showering passengers and crew with luggage and Christmas presents.

“My mother, who was sitting beside me, said, ‘Hopefully, this goes all right,” recalled Dr. Diller, who spoke by video from her home outside Munich, where she recently retired as deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. “Though I could sense her nervousness, I managed to stay calm.”

From a window seat in a back row, the teenager watched a bolt of lightning strike the plane’s right wing. She remembers the aircraft nose-diving and her mother saying, evenly, “Now it’s all over.” She remembers people weeping and screaming. And she remembers the thundering silence that followed. The aircraft had broken apart, separating her from everyone else onboard. “The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,” Dr. Diller said. “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.”

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