Juliane Diller, née Koepcke, is the subject of the spellbinding Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope (1998). Diller, a German-Peruvian biologist, was the 17-year-old sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash on 24 December, 1971. Diller, strapped in her seat, plummeted 10,000 feet into the Peruvian rainforest during a thunderstorm (the plane had been struck by lightning). Finding a stream and relying on basic survival skills, she travelled along it for nine days before stumbling upon local lumbermen who, at first believing her to be a ‘water godess’, took her to a lumber station via canoe. She was eventually airlifted to hospital. You couldn’t make this shit up. Extraordinary.
Before the plane crash.
Revisiting the crash site in 1998.
Further reading:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 