My spouse had told me recently about how squirrels are one of the only mammals that could survive a massive fall. Confused and surprised, I asked about how this all works. They told me about how terminal velocity works (I'm terrible with physics...) and relayed a story they had heard about a young German woman who was the only survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. I'd never heard about this before and we looked it up, only to find that it was more intense than that.
A JAT Airways McDonnell Douglas DC-9 (from Wikipedia)
The woman in question, Juliane Koepcke (née Diller), was only 17 when she and her mother were on LANSA Flight 508 when it plummeted out of the sky at 10,000 feet and into the jungle on December 24, 1971. Strapped in and taking a broken collarbone, a cut in her arm, and a concussion, she found herself stranded and needing to survive. While it was later discovered she wasn't the only survivor at first (there were 14 others), she was able to use the survival training she learned from her zoologist parents while helping them at their research station. The way this occurred appears to be particularly gnarly:
While in the jungle, she dealt with severe insect bites and an infestation of maggots in her wounded arm. After nine days, she was able to find an encampment that had been set up by local fishermen. She gave herself rudimentary first aid, which included pouring gasoline on her arm to force the maggots out of the wound. A few hours later, the returning fishermen found her, gave her proper first aid, and used a canoe to transport her to a more inhabited area. She was soon airlifted to a hospital. [1]
While there was some speculation about how she was able to survive (most likely from seating position on the flight), she went on to become a prominent mammologist herself in the 1980s and focused her work on studying bats. Her story has been recorded numerous times by a whole lot of articles, her own memoir about the event titled When I Fell from the Sky, and a low-budget Italian film called Miracles Still Happen. Apparently the most accurate filmed take is the 1998 documentary Wings of Hope from Werner Herzog, the only director I'm sure who could ever do this kind of story and was supposed to be on the same flight as her to film parts of Aguirre, the Wrath of God:
After looking this up, I became curious about other sole survivors of large plane crashes. Going down this particularly morbid rabbit hole led to another woman in a similar situation a month after Koepcke's ordeal: a Yugoslav flight attendant named Vesna Vulović.
Vulović was only slightly older (age 22) than Koepcke when she had her own plane crash experience. Prior to then, she went to England to brush up on her English she picked up from being a Beatlemaniac but ended up going to Stockholm with a friend shortly thereafter. Afraid of their daughter getting corrupted by randy dope-smoking Swedes, her parents ordered her to come back to Serbia and it was there she decided being a flight attendant for the Yugoslav national airline was her life's calling. "I thought, 'Why shouldn't I be an air hostess? I could go to London once a month,'" she recalled later when asked.
There's an extensive amount available written about both Vulović and JAT Flight 367 itself but it went basically like this: on January 26, 1972, a JAT plane was returning from Stockholm to Belgrade but had to make a stop in Copenhagen to change out the crew that included Vulović. She and some of the crew noticed during changeover that one of the passengers leaving seemed suspiciously irritated but didn't think any further on it. Nothing seemed unusual until around 4pm while in Czechoslovak airspace near the village of Srbská Kamenice, when a briefcase exploded in the baggage hold and ripped the whole plane apart mid-air. Anything that was still intact soon fell into the local mountainside over 6 miles (specifically 33,300 feet) from the sky. Out of the 28 people onboard, only Vulović survived but in a coma after she was discovered by a local villager who had been a medic during World War II.
Vulović soon suffered a coma and amnesia for a month, she wouldn't learn about the crash until two weeks after it happened and only could remember greeting passengers in Copenhagen as the last thing she knew before the explosion. According to the investigations, the reason for her survival was quite extraordinary:
Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food cart in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact. Vulović's physicians concluded that her history of low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly after the cabin depressurized and kept her heart from bursting on impact. Vulović said that she was aware of her low blood pressure before applying to become a flight attendant and knew that it would result in her failing her medical examination, but she drank an excessive amount of coffee beforehand and was accepted. [2]
Once out of the coma, she spent 16 months recovering in Prague and Belgrade, able to regain her memory and the ability to walk despite having her spine permanently twisted and moving with a limp. She was quoted saying about this recovery that "Nobody ever expected me to live this long," due to her "Serbian stubbornness" and "a childhood diet that included chocolate, spinach, and fish oil." [3] Even more impressive, she returned to working for JAT negotiating freight contracts (there were concerns about her fame being distracting as a flight attendant) and continued to fly regularly for most of her life.
The flight was, predictably, a big deal at the time for Yugoslavia as there had been a series of attacks from Croatian nationalists connected to the Ustaše who soon claimed responsibility along with a train attack the same day between Vienna and Zagreb. The bombing then led to several conspiracy theories, including one about friendly fire from the Czechoslovak missile defense system. There was also a good deal of skepticism about how someone could survive from the height but there's been documented proof that it is possible [4].
That all said, things got more interesting for a woman relegated to a desk job after a terrorist attack. She was honored as a national Yugoslav hero by Tito, noted as a "Cold War heroine" by most Warsaw Pact countries, and received the Guinness World Record and a celebration gala hosted (fittingly) by Paul McCartney in 1985 for surviving the highest non-parachuted fall ever made by a human being. By the 1990s, she was forced to leave JAT due to her pro-democracy and anti-Milošević protesting and suffered a nasty smear campaign during the wars during that decade, claiming that the conspiracy theories were truer than her experience. Even after the "Bulldozer Revolution" in 2000, she continued promoting democracy in Serbia but suffered survivor's guilt and hardships as a pensioner until her death in 2016, where her heart appeared to give out and her friends found her in her apartment well after she had passed.
So how does talking about squirrels surviving falls lead to all this about plane crashes? Simple: it's two of the many examples of how bizarre and miraculous the universe actually is and how hard it is to predict how things will occur when pushed to extremes. I know that I often wonder what I would do when placed in such situations, figuring I'd either crumple up and die or learn how to fight and survive within a matter of seconds. While we're often confronted with more tragic stories - especially when speaking about disasters like these - there's a comfort in learning that people are able to survive in these situations, either through applying well-learned skills like Koepcke or sheer luck and determination like Vulović. The fact that there are others only adds to this feeling, such as:
Ivan Chisov, who fell 23,000 feet and survived while in combat;
Nicholas Alkemade, who survived a 18,000-footfoot drop while jumping out of his burning heavy bomber;
Alan Magee, surviving a 22,000-foot fall from his damaged B-17;
Nestor Mata, the sole survivor of the 1957 Cebu Douglas C-47 crash that killed the President of the Philippines;
Annette Herfkens, the sole survivor of Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 in 1992; and
Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor of Yemenia Flight 626 in 2009.
End Notes
[1] From the Wikipedia page about Koepcke.
[2] From the Wikipedia page about Vulović.
[3] From the Wikipedia page about Vulović.
[4] According to the Amazing Survival Wiki page on her, "The American show Mythbusters re-created Vesna's fall to see if it was survivable. The Mythbusters concluded it was possible to survive the fall depending on how the wreckage someone was sittine in landed but noted it was still very unlikely that the wreckage would land in a favourable manner. Discovery Channel's Against all Odds also profiled Vesna's amazing fall to earth."