Survivor from the Sky

In a remarkable documentary, Wings of Hope, German director Werner Herzog re-counts the true story of an eighteen-year-old girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon jungle in 1971. Twenty-nine years later, Herzog returns to the jungle with Juliane Koepke, now a 46-year-old biologist, and she tells her amazing story on film. Juliane had just graduated from high school in Lima, Peru and, with her mother, was flying out to spend Christmas at her father’s research station in the jungle. A half hour into the flight they encountered a horrific storm. In the midst of wild turbulence, the plane was struck by lightning and fell into a nosedive. Passengers screamed as baggage flew around the compartment. Then the plane broke into pieces and suddenly Juliane found herself outside free-falling 30,000 feet. ‘I was suspended in mid-air, still in my scat. It wasn’t so much that I had left the plane but that the plane had left me. It simply wasn’t there any more. I was all alone with my row of seats,’ says Juliane. ‘I sailed on through the air, then I tumbled into a fall. The seatbelt squeezed my stomach and I couldn’t breathe any more.’ Before she lost consciousness, Juliane saw the dense jungle below, ‘a deep green, like broccoli’, with no clearings for hundreds of miles. Somehow, miraculously, Juliane survived that fall from the sky. In the film, she speculates on a number of factors which may have combined to save her. First, the storm had produced a strong updraft from the thunder clouds. Secondly, being strapped into a row of seats, she was aware of falling in a…