Juliane Koepcke. Beate Rygiert - When I Fell From the Sky: The True Story of One Woman’s Miraculous Survival

WHEN I FELL FROM THE SKY

The True Story of One Womans Miraculous Survival

The True Story of One Womans Miraculous Survival

BY JULIANE KOEPCKE

IN COLLABORATION WITH BEATE RYGIERT
TRANSLATED BY ROSS BENJAMIN

WHEN I FELL FROM THE SKY
The True Story of One Womans Miraculous Survival

Written by Juliane Koepcke
In Collaboration with Beate Rygiert
Translated by Ross Benjamin

Copyright 2011 Juliane Koepcke and Piper Verlag, Munich
English Translation Copyright 2011 Ross Benjamin

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, except for passages excerpted for the purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact:

TitleTown Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 12093 Green Bay, WI 54307-12093 920.737.8051 | titletownpublishing.com

North American Editor: Stephanie Finnegan
Production Associate: Martin Lederman
Cover Design: Dale Fiorillo
Interior Layout and Design: Erika L. Block

PUBLISHERS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Koepcke, Juliane.

When I fell from the sky : the true story of one womans miraculous survival / Juliane Koepcke ; in collaboration with Beate Rygiert ; translated by Ross Benjamin. 1st English ed. -- Green Bay, Wis. : TitleTown Publishing, c2011.

p. ; cm.

ISBN: 978-0-9837547-0-1
Translation of: Als ich vom Himmel fiel : wie mir der Dschungel mein Leben
zurckgab (Munich : Malik, 2011; 9783890293899).
Includes index.
Summary: Describes the 11-day ordeal faced by the 17-year old sole survivor of an
airplane crash in the Peruvian jungle in 1971.

1. Koepcke, Juliane. 2. Airplane crash survival--Peru--Personal narratives. 3. Aircraft accidents--Peru--Personal narratives. I. Rygiert, Beate. II. Benjamin, Ross. III. Title: Als ich vom Himmel fiel.

TL553.9 .K6413 2011

1110

363.1/248092--dc23

Printed in the USA
first edition printed on recycled paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, who dedicated her short life to the birds of Peru, and who was torn much too soon from my side.

She did not leave the airplane, the airplane left her.

Werner Herzog, director and producer

He was the first person I saw, and it was as if an angel were coming toward me.

Juliane Koepcke, describing her rescuer in

the Wings of Hope documentary

Christmas Eve, 1971

The flight from Lima to Pucallpa takes only about an hour. On December 24, 1971, the first thirty minutes are perfectly normal. Our fellow passengers are in high spirits. Everyone is excited to celebrate Christmas at home. The luggage bins are stuffed with presents, and everyone is settled in for the flight. After about twenty minutes, were served a small breakfast, which includes a sandwich and drink. Ten minutes later the stewardesses are cleaning up our areas.

Then, all of a sudden, we hit a storm front.

And this time its completely different from anything Ive experienced before. The pilot does not avoid the thunderstorm, but flies straight into the cauldron of hell. It turns to night around us, in broad daylight. Lightning is flashing feverishly from all directions.

At the same time an invisible power begins to shake our airplane as if it were a plaything. The people cry out as objects fall on their heads from the violently opened overhead compartments. Bags, flowers, packages, toys, wrapped gifts, jackets and clothing rain down hard on us; sandwich trays and bags soar through the air; half-finished drinks splatter on our heads and shoulders. Everyone is frightened, and I hear screams and cries.

A few weeks before that flight on Christmas Eve, 1971, I had gone on an eight-day trip with my whole class. We flew to Arequipa in the southern part of the country, and in a letter to my grandmother I wrote: The flight was glorious! At the end of the trip, the return flight to Lima was extremely turbulent, and many of my classmates felt physically ill. But I wasnt nervous at all. I even enjoyed the rocking. I was so naive that it didnt even occur to me that something could happen.

My mother, however, doesnt like to fly. She often says: Its totally unnatural that such a bird made of metal takes off into the air. As an ornithologist, she sees this from a different standpoint than other people do. On one of her flights to the United States, she already had an experience that gave her a huge scare, when an engine malfunctioned. Even though nothing happened and the plane was still able to land safely with one engine, she was sweating.

Hopefully, this goes all right, my mother says. I can feel her nervousness, while I myself am still pretty calm.

Then I suddenly see a blinding white light over the right wing. I dont know whether its a flash of lightning striking there or an explosion. I lose all sense of time. I cant tell whether all this lasts minutes or only a fraction of a second: Im blinded by that blazing light.

With a jolt, the tip of the airplane falls steeply downward. Even though Im in a window seat all the way in the back, I can see the whole aisle to the cockpit, which is below me. The physical laws have been suspended; its like an earthquake. No, it is worse. Because now were racing downward. Were falling. People are screaming in panic, shrill cries for help; the roar of the plummeting turbines, which I will hear again and again in my dreams, engulfs me.

And there, over everything, clear as glass, I hear my mother saying quite calmly: Now its all over.

Today I know that at that moment she already grasped what would happen.

I, on the other hand, grasp nothing at all.

An intense astonishment comes over me, because now my ears, my headno, I myself am completely filled with the deep roar of the plane, while its nose slants almost vertically downward. Were plummeting. But this nosedive, too, I experience as if it lasted no longer than the blink of an eye. From one moment to the next, the peoples screams go silent. Its as if the roar of the turbines has been erased.

My mother is no longer at my side and Im no longer in the airplane. Im still strapped into my seat, but Im alone.

At an altitude of about ten thousand feet, Im alone.

And Im falling, slicing through the sky about 2 miles above the earth.

A view into the canopy of the rain forest of Panguana, 2010. This is the type of canopy that broke my fall through the sky. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

Many people wonder how I still manage to get on airplanes, for I am one of the few who have survived a plane crash from a great height. It was a catastrophe that occurred nearly ten thousand feet over the Peruvian rain forest. But thats not all: After the crash I struggled for eleven days on my own through the jungle. At that time, when I fell from the sky, I was just seventeen years old.

Today Im fifty-six. A good age for looking back. A good time to confront old, unhealed wounds and to share with other people my memories, which are just as fresh and alive after all these years. The crash, of which I was the sole survivor, shaped the rest of my life, pointed it in a new direction and led me to where I am today. Back then, newspapers all over the world were full of my story. Among them there were many half-truths and reports that had little to do with the actual events. Because of them, people still approach me to this day and ask about the crash. Everyone in Germany and Peru seems to know my story, and yet scarcely anyone has a genuine idea of what really happened back then.