I heard this story a lot when I was a kid. It'd come round once a year or so, "this girl fell out of an exploding plane once and lived!" It excited the mind, even if you hadn't been on an aircraft and none of us had back then, you'd still see them flying over and wonder : what would it be like to fall from one of those, fall through all the air and space, and live? It was a subject worthy of a few lunchtime discussions once or twice a year - she clung the wing, all the way down. No, she was still strapped into her seat, and that landed on a big piece of wing and she sailed all the way down to Earth. Something like that. It changed from year to year.
But the real story was never in the newspapers, and no books in the school library mentioned it, so it became one of those 'Did That Really Happen?' stories of childhood. Like a myth.
The story is real. It happened to Juliane Koepcke on Chrismas Eve, 1971. She was flying into the Amazon rainforest on an airliner with family members. The jet exploded and fell from the sky :
"We were headed straight down. Christmas presents were flying around the cabin and I could hear people screaming."
"Suddenly there was this amazing silence. The plane was gone. I must have been unconscious and then came to in midair. I was flying, spinning through the air and I could see the forest spinning beneath me."
She fell three kilometres and landed in the rainforest. She had minor cuts. She was still strapped into the row of airliner seats.
"(the row of seats) was rotating much like the helicopter and that might have slowed the fall. Also, the place I landed had very thick foliage and that might have lessened the impact."
Her dramatic survival story doesn't end there. She spent days and nights in the rainforest, following a creek to a stream to a river where she hoped she would be found. Maggots infested one of her wounds :
"Later, after I was rescued it was treated and more than 50 maggots were found inside. I still wonder how so many maggots could have fitted into that little hole...."
She became known, and rightly so, as The Miracle Girl.
Her thoughts on the recent air disasters?
"It just horrifies me. I only hope it all went quickly for those on board."There's much more to this story, well worth reading.
