The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away’

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima, Peru. She was headed for Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, both zoologists.About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, was struck by lightning and broke apart. Strapped to her seat, Juliane fell some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash.LANSA Flight 508 was the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history.In the 50 years since the crash, Juliane moved to Germany, earned a Ph.D. in biology, became an eminent zoologist, got married — and, after her father’s death, took over as director of Panguana and the primary organizer of expeditions to the refuge.To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

An old family story. My father was an inventor and an unapologetic punster. One of his many patents was for an early multi-directional TV antenna. He not only designed the antenna, but installed it atop the tower at the Empire State Building. The building itself is 1,250 feet tall. The tower climbs another 204 feet, the equivalent of about 17 stories. The year after my dad scaled the tower, he started dating the woman who would become my mother. He tried to impress her with tales of his daring do, one of which involved ascending to the tip of the tower

a la King Kong in a gusty wind. But Sid, she said, what if you've been blown off? My father, the story goes, smiled and cracked. The funeral would have been terribly sad, but the reception would be fantastic. reception would be fantastic. My father, in his own way, was trying to encourage optimism in the face of misfortune, essentially making chicken salad out of chicken whatever. And so I was reminded of this yarn when my son-in-law forwarded an Instagram post about Juliana Diller, who 50 years ago was the sole survivor of the deadliest lightning strike disaster in aviation history. Today, she runs Penguana, a research station founded by her parents in Peru, some 20 miles from the crash site. My name is Franz Lids, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.

I wrote this story about Juliana Diller's Fall and Rise. On the morning after Juliana Diller fell to earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest, dazed with incomprehension. Just before noon on the previous day, Christmas Eve 1971, Juliana, then 17, and her mother had boarded a flight in Lima bound for Pucallpa, a rough-and-tumble port city along the Ucayali River. Her final destination was Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans Wilhelm Kupka, both zoologists. The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane, an 86-passengered L-188A electric turbo prop, flew into a

thunderstorm and began to shake. Overhead storage bins popped open, showering passengers and crew with luggage and Christmas presents. My mother, who was sitting beside me, said, hopefully this goes all right. We called Dr. Diller, who spoke by video from her home outside Munich, where she recently retired as deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. Though I could sense her nervousness, I managed to stay calm. From a window seat in a back row, the teenager watched the bolt of lightning strike the plane's right wing. She remembers the aircraft nosediving and her mother saying evenly, Now it's all over.

She remembers people weeping and screaming. And she remembers the thundering silence that followed. The aircraft had broken apart, separating her from everyone else on board. The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin, Dr. Diller said. I was outside, in the open air. I hadn't left the plane. The plane had left me. As she plunged, the three-seat bench into which she was belted spun like the winged seed of a maple tree, towards the jungle canopy. From above, the treetops resembled heads of broccoli, Dr. Diller recalled. Then she blacked out, only to regain consciousness, alone, under the bench, in a torn mini-dress.

On Christmas morning, she had fallen some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliana was the sole survivor of the crash. Miraculously, her injuries were relatively minor. A broken collarbone, a sprained knee and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut, and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit. Most unbearable among the discomforts was the disappearance of her eyeglasses,

she was nearsighted, and disappearance of her eyeglasses. She was nearsighted and one of her open back sandals. I lay there almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night until the next morning, she wrote in her memoir, When I Fell from the Sky, published in Germany in 2011. I am completely soaked, covered with mud and dirt, for it must have been pouring rain for a day and a night. She listened to the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs, and the buzzing of insects. I recognized the sounds of wildlife from Panguana and realized I was in the same jungle and had survived the crash, Dr. Diller said. What I experienced was not fear, but a boundless feeling of abandonment.

In shock, befogged by a concussion and with only a small bag of candy to sustain her, she soldiered on through the fearsome Amazon. Eight-foot speckled caimans, poisonous snakes and spiders, stingless bees that clumped to her face, ever-present swarms of mosquitoes, riverbed stingrays that, when stepped on, instinctively lash out with their barbed venomous tails. It was the middle of the wet season so there was no fruit within reach to pick and no dry kindling with which to make a fire. River water provided what little nourishment Juliana received. For 11 days, despite the staggering humidity and blast furnace heat, she walked and waited

and swam. This year is the 50th anniversary of LANSA Flight 508, the deadliest lightning strike disaster in aviation history. During the intervening years, Juliana moved to Germany, earned a PhD in biology, and became an eminent zoologist. In 1989, she married Eric Diller, an entomologist and an authority on parasitic wasps. Despite an understandable unease about air travel, she has been continually drawn back to Panguana, the remote conservation outpost established by her parents in 1968. The jungle caught me and saved me, said Dr. Diller, who hasn't spoken publicly about the accident in many years, it was not its fault that I landed there. In 1981, she spent 18 months in residence at the station while researching her graduate

thesis on diurnal butterflies and her doctoral dissertation on bats. Nineteen years later, after the death of her father, Dr. Diller took over as director of Panguana and primary organizer of international expeditions to the refuge. On my lonely 11-day hike back to civilization, I made myself a promise, Dr. Diller said. I vowed that if I stayed alive, I would devote my life to a meaningful cause that served nature and humanity. That cause would become Panguana, the oldest biological research station in Peru. Starting in the 1970s, Dr. Diller and her father lobbied the government to protect the area from clearing, hunting, and colonization. Finally, in 2011, the newly minted Ministry of

Environment declared Panguana a private conservation area. To help acquire adjacent plots of land, Dr. Diller enlisted sponsors from abroad. Largely through the largesse of Hope Pfisteri, a bakery chain based in Munich, the property has expanded from its original 445 acres to 4,000. Juliana is an outstanding ambassador for how much private philanthropy can achieve, said Stefan Stolte, an executive board member of Stifterverband, a German non-profit that promotes education, science, and innovation. Over the past half century, panguana has been an engine of scientific discovery. To date, the flora and fauna have provided the fodder for 315 published papers on such exotic topics as the biology of the neotropical orchid genus catacetum and the protrusile pheromone glands of the Loring Mantid. Cleaved by the Uyapichas River, the preserve is home to more than 500 species of trees, 16 of them palms, 160 types of reptiles and amphibians,

100 different kinds of fish, 7 varieties of monkey, and 380 bird species. Panguana's name comes from the local word for the undulated tinamu, a species of ground bird common to the Amazon basin. a species of ground bird common to the Amazon basin. Dr. Diller's favorite childhood pet was a panguana she named Pulsarcan, or Little Pillow, because of its soft plumage. Panguana offers outstanding conditions for biodiversity researchers, serving both as a home base with excellent infrastructure and as a starting point into the primary rainforest just a few yards away.

Said Andreas Segerer, Deputy Director for the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology, Munich, its extraordinary biodiversity is a Garden of Eden for scientists and a source of yielding successful research projects. Entomologists have cataloged a teeming array of insects on the ground and in the treetops of panguana, including butterflies, more than 600 species, orchard bees, 26 species, and moths, some 15,000. Manfried Verhag of the National History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, identified 520 species of ants, so much for picnics at Panguana. While working on her dissertation, Dr. Diller documented 52 species of bats at the reserve. We now know of 56, she said. By contrast, there are only 27 species in the entire continent of Europe. The preserve has been colonized by all three species of vampires. Although they seldom attack humans, one dined on Dr. Diller's big toe.

Vampire bats lap with their tongues rather than suck, she said. After they make a small incision with their teeth, protein in their saliva called dracolin acts as an anticoagulant, which keeps the blood flowing while they feed. Dr. Diller described her youth in Peru with enthusiasm and affection. She's born in Lima, where her parents worked at the National History Museum. Earthquakes were common. I grew up knowing that nothing is really safe, not even the solid ground I walked on, Dr. Diller said. The memories have helped me again and again to keep a cool head even in difficult situations. Dr. Diller said she was still haunted by the mid-air separation from her mother. Her voice lowered when she

recounted certain moments of the experience. Above all, of course, the moment when I had to accept that really only I had survived and that my mother had indeed died. Then there was a moment when I realized that I no longer heard any search planes and was convinced that I would surely die, and the feeling of dying without ever having done anything of significance

in my young life. She achieved the reluctant fame from the air disaster thanks to a cheesy Italian biopic in 1974, Miracles Still Happen, in which the teenage Dr. Diller is portrayed as a hysterical dingbat. She avoided the news media for many years after and is still stung by the early reportage, which was sometimes wildly inaccurate. According to an account in Life magazine in 1972, she made her getaway by building a raft of vines and branches. The German weekly, Sten, had her feasting on a cake she found in a wreckage and implied, from an interview conducted during her recovery, that she was arrogant and unfeeling. Victor Diller laid low until 1998,

when she was approached by the movie director Werner Herzog, who hoped to turn her survivor's story into a documentary for German TV. He had narrowly missed taking the same Christmas Eve flight while scouting locations for his historical drama, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. He told her, for all I know, we may have bumped elbows in the airport. Intrigued, Dr. Diller traveled to Peru and was flown by helicopter to the crash site, where she recounted the harrowing details to Mr. Herzog amid the plane's still-scattered remains. The most gruesome moment in the film was her recollection of the fourth day in the jungle, when she came upon a row of seats. Still strapped in were a woman and two men who had landed headfirst, with such force that they were buried three feet into the ground, legs jutting grotesquely upward.

It was horrifying, she told me. I didn't want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure that the woman wasn't my mother. I grabbed the stick and turned one of her feet carefully so I could see the toenails. They were polished and I took a deep breath. My mother had never used polish on her nails. The result of Dr. Diller's collaboration with Mr. Herzog was Wings of Hope, an unsettling film that filtered through Mr. Herzog's gruff humanism, demonstrated the strange and terrible beauty

of nature. Making the documentary was therapeutic, Dr. Diller said. At the time of the crash, no one offered me any formal counseling or psychological help. I had no idea that it was even possible to get help. Dr. Diller attributes her tenacity to her father, Hans Wilhelm Kupke, a single-minded ecologist. He met his wife, Maria von Mikulich-Ridecki, in 1947 at the University of Kiel, where both were biology students. Her PhD thesis dealt with the coloration of wild and domestic doves, his woodlice. Late in 1948, Kupka was offered a job at the Natural History Museum in Lima. Getting there was not easy. Post-war travel in Europe was difficult enough, but particularly problematic for Germans. There were no passports

and visas were hard to come by. To reach Peru, Dr. Kupka had to first get to a port and inveigle his way onto a transatlantic freighter. Setting off on foot, he trekked over several mountain ranges, was arrested, and served time in an Italian prison camp, and finally stowed away in the hold of a cargo ship bound for Uruguay by burrowing into a pile of rock salt. When he showed up at the office of the museum director two years after accepting the job offer, he was told the position had already been filled. He persevered and wound up managing the museum's ichthyology collection. His fiancée followed him in a South Pacific steamer in 1950 and was hired at the museum too, eventually running the ornithology department. M2, eventually running the ornithology department. An expert on neotropical birds, she has since been memorialized in the scientific names of four Peruvian species. He is remembered for a 1,684-page

two-volume opus, Life Forms, the basis for a universally valid biological theory. In 1956, biological theory. In 1956, a species of lava lizard endemic to Peru, Microlophus cupcaorum, was named in honor of the couple. In 1968, the cupcas moved from Lima to an abandoned patch of primary forest in the middle of the jungle. Their plan was to conduct field studies on its plants and animals for five years, exploring the rainforest without exploiting it. I wasn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of being there, Dr. Diller said. I was 14, and I didn't want to leave my schoolmates to sit in what I imagined would be the gloom under tall trees, whose canopy of leaves didn't permit even a glimmer of sunlight. To Juliana's surprise, her new home wasn't dreary at all. It was gorgeous, an idol on the river with trees that bloom

blazing red, she recalled in her memoir. There were mango, guava, and citrus fruits, and over everything, a glorious 150-foot-tall lapuna tree, also known as a kapok. The family lived in Panguana full-time with a German shepherd, Lobo, and a parakeet, Florian, in a wooden hut propped on stilts with a roof of palm thatch. Juliana was homeschooled for two years, receiving her textbooks and homework by mail, until the educational authorities demanded that she return to Lima to finish high school. Dr. Diller's parents instilled in their only child not only a love of the Amazon wilderness, but the knowledge of the inner workings of its volatile ecosystem. If you ever get lost in the rainforest,

they counseled, find moving water and follow its course to a river where human settlements are likely to be. Their advice proved prescient. In 1971, Juliana, hiking away from the crash site, came upon a creek which became a stream which eventually became a stream, which eventually became a river. On day 11 of her ordeal, she stumbled into the camp of a group of forest workers. They fed her cassava and poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots that

protruded like asparagus tips, she said. The next morning, the workers took her to a village from which she was flown to safety. For my parents, the rainforest station was a sanctuary, a place of peace and harmony, isolated and sublimely beautiful, Dr. Diller said. I feel the same way. The jungle was my real teacher. I learned to use old Indian trails as shortcuts and lay out a system of paths with a compass and folding ruler to orient myself in the thick bush. The jungle is as much a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash. its tributaries and the scars that remain from the plane crash.

Before 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic restricted international air travel, Dr. Diller made a point of visiting the nature preserve twice a year on month-long expeditions. Much of her administrative work involves keeping industrial and agricultural development at bay. She estimates that as much as 17% of Amazonia has been deforested and laments that vanishing ice, fluctuating rain patterns, and global warming, the average temperature at Panguana has risen by four degrees Celsius in the past 30 years, are causing its wetlands to shrink. A recent study published in the journal Science Advances warned that the rainforest may be nearing a dangerous tipping point. After 20 percent, there is no possibility of recovery, Dr. Diller said grimly. You could expect a major forest dieback and a rather sudden evolution to something else,

probably a degraded savanna. That would lead to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the preservation of the Peruvian rainforest is so urgent and necessary. Under Dr. Diller's stewardship, Panguana has increased its outreach to neighboring indigenous communities by providing jobs, bankrolling a new schoolhouse, and raising awareness about the short and long-term effects of human activity on the rainforest biodiversity and climate change. The key is getting the surrounding population to commit to preserving and protecting

its environment, she said. Species and climate protection will only work if the locals are integrated into the projects, have a benefit for their already modest living conditions, and the cooperation is transparent. And so she plans to go back and continue returning once air travel allows. Fifty years after Dr. Diller's traumatic journey through the jungle, she is pleased to look back on her life and know that it has achieved purpose and meaning. Just to have helped people and to have done something for nature means it was good that I was allowed to survive, she said with a flicker of a smile. And for that, I am so grateful.