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Juliane Koepcke and the LANSA Disaster
🕑 Added 2022-11-08 11:15:00 +0000 UTCWhile making this video, I read Juliane's autobiography, When I Fell From The Sky. It contains a wealth of details that I couldn't fit into the video. Here are two of the most interesting.
Werner Herzog
Even before he decided to make a documentary about Juliane's survival story, Werner Herzog had a strange connection to the fateful LANSA flight. When it departed from Jorge Chavez International Airport, he was actually there. And, moreover, he was desperately trying to book seats on the flight for him and his crew.
He was in the process of filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and needed to get to the flight's first stop of Pucallpa. Apparently he put up quite a fight to try and get on the plane, as his flight the previous day had been cancelled too.
Fortunately for him and his crew, he was unable to get seats. Later, when speaking about the accident and Juliane's survival, he gave the unforgettable quote:
"She did not leave the airplane, the airplane left her."
A medical miracle
When Juliane was finally seen by a doctor, it was noted that she had ruptured a ligament in her knee as a result of the fall. That was hardly surprising - what was rather amazing, though, was that she then walked on that injured knee for eleven days.
It was only after she was safe that her knee became swollen and she experienced difficulty walking. Juliane speculates that her body suppressed its natural reaction to the injury until she was out of danger.
To quote an orthopaedist who spoke to her afterwards: "Medically, that's completely impossible." And yet... she made it out of the jungle nonetheless.
Comments
Fascinating Horror
She's fascinating - her book is a really wonderful read. She's so calm and measured about all of her experiences
Jennifer Durham
Excellent work, as always. She is a very interesting person!
Fascinating Horror
This is on my list. As a matter of fact, I think Juliane mentions it in her book. She said that she was often compared to the Bahia by the media, as they were both sole survivors who had been through incredible hardship to survive
Michael Rutherford
How about a video on Yemenia Flight 626? It's a plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean in 2009 and, like LANSA 508, only had one survivor. That one survivor was a 12-almost-13-year old girl named Bahia Bakari who survived floating in the ocean clinging to wreckage for (either nine or thirteen hours depending on the source you read) before being rescued. Like Julianne, Bahia also wrote a book about her experience. Apparently she turned down an offer from Steven Spielberg to have her book turned into a movie.
