How a 17-year-old survived a plane crash and 11 days in the jungle

Juliane Koepcke, 71, has never struggled to recount the Christmas of 1971. She was just 17, flying home to see her father in Panguana. The passengers were already frustrated after a seven-hour delay when the aircraft encountered a violent thunderstorm over the Peruvian rainforest. Fear glistened in her eyes as she saw the lightning around the plane.

Scared, she held her mother’s hand tightly. Neither of them could speak. The other passengers began to scream and weep.“After about 10 minutes, I saw a very bright light on the outer engine on the left. My mother said very calmly, ‘That is the end, it's all over.’ Those were the last words I ever heard from her,” Koepcke recounted to the BBC, 40 years after the incident.The plane went into a nosedive, and all she could see was pitch black and the people screaming.

The engine’s roar drowned out all other noises. Then the noise stopped, and she was out in the sky, in a free fall, still strapped to her seat. Juliane plunged thousands of metres towards the jungle as LANSA Flight 508 broke apart in mid-air.