On Christmas Eve 1971, half an hour after take-off from Lima airport, Peru, a passenger plane bound for Pucallpa in the Amazon rainforest flew into a thunderstorm.
The plane started lurching and bumping in the air. Then, in a single, catastrophic moment, a bolt of lightning hit one of the fuel tanks and tore the right wing off. Lansa Flight 508 went into a nosedive and all 92 of its passengers and crew were killed, except for one.
One minute Juliane Koepcke, 17, was sitting in the window seat next to her mother; the next she was falling through the air, still strapped to her seat, and her mother had vanished. The filmmaker Werner Herzog, who some 30 years later was to make a documentary about Koepcke’s extraordinary survival, said, 'She did not leave the airplane, the airplane left her.’
Koepcke remembers falling head first with the seatbelt digging into her stomach and a canopy of trees spiralling towards her. Then she lost consciousness. She came to the next morning on the floor of the rainforest.
More @ The Telegraph
wow. That's pretty darned impressive!
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