Juliane Koepcke: The girl who fell 3km from a plane explosion and survived

The chances of surviving a mid-air plane explosion are so small that it is almost beyond comprehension.

But for a 17-year-old girl named Juliane Koepcke, a 3km plunge to the ground was just the beginning of an incredible survival story.

It was Christmas Eve, 1971, and Juliane and her mother were passengers onboard a flight from the Peruvian capital of Lima to the inland city of Pucallpa.

Her mother wanted the two of them to fly to meet their father in Pucallpa a few days earlier, but the then teenager begged to stay longer so she could attend a school dance and graduation ceremony.

Flying over the Amazon rainforest about midday, the Lockheed L-188A flew into a dark cloud and was struck by lightning.

While lightning strikes on passenger planes are common and usually harmless, this strike caused the plane's engine caught fire.

"The plane jumped down and went into a nose-dive. It was pitch black and people were screaming, then the deep roaring of the engines filled my head completely," Juliane told the BBC in 2012.

"Suddenly the noise stopped and I was outside the plane. I was in a freefall, strapped to my seat bench and hanging head-over-heels.

"The whispering of the wind was the only noise I could hear."

Juliane recalled her mother and the passenger on the other side being thrown from their seats, and she was falling in a tailspin, strapped in to the window seat of a row of three.

Surviving a 30m fall is an iffy proposition, but Juliane was in a freefall from a hundred times that height, without a parachute, nothing but the seat she was strapped into to break her fall.

And remarkably, it did.

The landing

The teen blacked out as she was spinning uncontrollably to the ground, so it is not certain how she survived the landing.

But ploughing through more than 30m of the thick leaves and branches of the Amazon rainforest canopy had slowed her down enough that the final impact did not kill her.

Instead she survived with no injuries but a broken collarbone, a swollen eye, a torn ACL, a partially fractured shin and cuts on her arms and legs.

Juliane spent a day slipping in and out of consciousness, and hours more unable to stand because she was so dizzy.

When she regained her bearings, the brutal reality of her situation set in. She was in the middle of the jungle, with no one to rescue her.

She had lost her glasses and one of her sandals. She was wearing a sleeveless minidress.

But Juliane was perhaps the only 17-year-old German girl in the world uniquely qualified to survive in the jungle.

The crash site

Julieanne was born in Peru but was a German national, her father Hans-Wilhelm a famed biologist and her mother Maria a barrier-breaking ornithologist.

"Before the crash, I had spent a year and a half with my parents on their research station only 30 miles away," Juliane said.

"I learned a lot about life in the rainforest, that it wasn't too dangerous. It's not the green hell that the world always thinks."

Her attitude seems remarkably blasé. The Peruvian Amazon is home to countless venomous snakes, poisonous frogs, crocodiles, anacondas and electric eels.

And without her glasses, the very short-sighted teen had to step very carefully. She would throw her sandal at the ground in front of her every few steps to frighten off any snakes, making her movements arduous and slow.

She spent a day searching in vain for her mother, before concluding that she had to find help for herself.

She found a bag of lollies, the only food she would eat for the next ten days.

The trek

Juliane followed the advice she had been told by her father – advice that viewers of Bear Grylls' Man Vs Wild should be able to recite.

"He said if you find a creek, follow it because that will lead to a stream and a stream will lead to a bigger river and that's where you'll find help," Juliane told CNN in 2009.

She found a creek and began following the current, eventually coming to a larger river.

Walking in the water allowed her to avoid the difficult terrain of the rainforest, but it came with its own challenges.

"Sometimes I would see a crocodile on the bank and it would start into the water towards me, but I was not afraid," she said.

"I knew crocodiles don't tend to attack humans."

For the first few days she could hear the drone of search planes flying above her, but because of the thick jungle canopy she could not see them.

A few days later, she stopped hearing the planes.

Along the way, one of her cuts became infected. A fly had laid its eggs in a gash on Juliane's arm, and maggots were starting to eat at her flesh.

Try as she did, she could not get them out, and she began to fear the infection would cost her arm.

Juliane was struck by how tame the animals around her were. Monkeys and deer would normally steer clear of humans.

But she had a creeping thought – the animals were unfazed because they didn't know what humans looked like.

"That made me think, but then I blocked those thoughts out—of there possibly not being any help out there," she told Vice.

The boat

After ten days without food the teen was extraordinarily weak. Exhausted, she fell asleep on a riverbank.

When she woke up, she saw an empty boat.

"I thought that I was hallucinating at first, that I was starting to lose my mind. I stared at the boat and moved toward it slowly," she said.

"I couldn't move fast because I was so weak."

From the boat, Juliane found a pathway up a hill. She crawled up to find an empty hut and a barrel of diesel.

Following the example of her father treating her dog's infection, she siphoned the fuel from the barrel and poured it over her wound.

The pain from the diesel was excruciating but it brought the maggots to the surface, and she was able to pick them off.

Aware she was on the verge of starving to death, she tried to catch frogs to eat.

Juliane did not know they were poisonous dart frogs, but she was too slow to catch them anyway.

She considered taking the boat to find help, but she did not want to steal it.

Instead she decided to rest at the hut for another night.

The water spirit

In that part of Peru, locals believed in water spirits called Yemanja.

According to the folklore, the Yemanja are pale and blonde, unlike almost anybody else in that part of the country.

So when their lumber workers came through the clearing to see Juliane, they thought they were seeing a water spirit.

But the trio cared for Juliane, giving her the first food she had eaten for ten days, and looking after her wounds.

The next day they took the boat to a nearby village, where she was flown to Pucallpa to be reunited with her father.

The aftermath

Juliane's directions were enough to lead authorities to the crash site, where they were able to identify the victims, including her mother.

Of the 91 people on board, Juliane was the only survivor.

A shy teen, Juliane was overwhelmed by the public interest in her story. She was bombarded with letters from all over the world. Some addressed simply "Juliane – Peru" made it to her.

Juliane said she had nightmares about the crash for a long time, and was troubled that she survived when others didn't.

But one particular revelation would go on to haunt her.

"Later I found out that (my mother) also survived the crash but was badly injured and she couldn't move. She died several days later," she said.

"I dread to think what her last days were like."

Juliane is now living a world away from the Amazonian jungle, working as a librarian in Munich after gaining her doctorate in mammalogy.

She would return to Peru after her PhD to study bats, publishing her thesis in 1987.

A fictionalised movie named Miracles Still Happen about her survival was made by Italian director Giuseppe Maria Scotese.

In 1998, Juliane returned to the crash site with famed documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had intended to fly on the doomed flight 27 years earlier, but had a change of schedule.

Her story is reminiscent of Vesna Vulovic, a Yugoslavian flight attendant who fell 10km without a parachute when a bomb blew up her plane.

Read her incredible story here.