If you speak German here she is describing what happened to her in 1971 on youtube: German documentary
I can remember her being in the news in 1971 and her name Koepcke I believe was pronounced
Ko peck e (long o long E at the end). Peck pronounced like a peck of apples. At least this was the Americanized pronunciation of her name in 1971 in the U.S.
Woman describes what it was like to be the only survivor of a flight obliterated by a thunderstorm
By Barbara Tasch
11 hours ago
Everyone on board died that night
except for Koepcke, who was believed to be dead before she reappeared
after trekking through the jungle for 11 days.
In a 2010 interview with Vice News and a 2000 German documentary about her story, Koepcke goes over what happened during those days that changed her life.
Seat 19F
Koepcke and her mother boarded a plane to
Pucallpa on Christmas Eve 1971 to celebrate Christmas with her father
in an outpost in the middle of the Amazon forest where her parents both
worked. While they were happy to catch the flight out before Christmas,
mixed feelings about the airline's bad reputation — two planes had
crashed recently — plagued them as well.
In the documentary directed by Werner
Herzog, a grown-up Koepcke flies out to the jungle with her husband and
the film crew. She sits in the same seat, 19F, near the window, as she
did in 1971.
“I have, since that time, lost my trust
in planes and pilots, I listen to every sound and am nervous every time I
fly," she told the filmmakers.
She started noticing that
something was wrong, however, when her mother became nervous about the
clouds getting darker and darker and the turbulence more vigorous.
“It was really scary. We flew into
pitch-black clouds that were stroking the plane as if they were alive,”
Koepcke recounted in the documentary.
Then, suddenly, the plane was in the middle of a big storm with constant thunder and lightning. At some point, Koepcke saw a lightning strike hit one of the motors, and her mother then screamed, “Now it’s over.”
She describes what followed as a blur but remembers some scenes.
“I remember the plane going straight
down, and the motor making a lot of noise, and people screaming,”
Koepcke told Herzog. "And then suddenly I was outside of the plane. I
was falling head down with the seat belt pressing my stomach so much I
couldn't breathe. In that moment I knew exactly what had happened but
did not have the time to be scared because I fainted.”
Regaining consciousness wasn't easy. Koepcke
had a large concussion, and the capillaries in her eyes had popped
because of the pressure inside and outside the plane. She had just
fallen over 10,000 feet out of the sky. She remembers, however, she
wasn't in any pain.
First, even though Koepcke woke up underneath her seat, she had to have landed on top of it. In the documentary, she offers three explanations for how she survived what easily could have been a deadly fall.
1. During storms, sometimes heavy winds blow upward, which may have slowed down her fall.
2.
She may have been attached to one end of the seat and, not unlike a
maple seed, swirled down instead of a falling in a straight line.
3. The dense tangle of lianas covering the trees cushioned the final moments of her fall.
It's probably a combination of all three explanations, according to Koepcke.
It took her half a day before she
could walk. The first thing she tried to do was find her mother, and she
searched the same place multiple times but couldn't see or hear
anything.
'I knew ... they wouldn’t continue looking for me'
Born to German parents in Lima in 1954, Koepcke
spent a lot of her time in the Amazon forest. Her father, a zoologist,
and her mother, an ornithologist, worked out of a research outpost in
the middle of the forest. Koepcke had lived with her
parents for a year and a half before the crash and therefore knew a lot
about the inner-workings of its ecosystem — knowledge that would
eventually save her.
Once she was able to walk, Koepcke
eventually found a stream and started following it. She remembered her
father telling her to follow a stream if she was ever lost in the jungle
because it would lead to a bigger one and ultimately to help.
While following it on the fourth day after the crash, Koepcke came
across three bodies of people still in their seats. She didn't dare
touch the bodies, so she grabbed a stick and poked them. She said in the documentary that one was a woman, and Koepcke wanted to know whether it was her mother. It wasn't.
Afterward she started seeing rescue planes and tried but failed to draw their attention to her.
The plane and some of its parts rained down on the Amazon forest over a 5.8-square-mile area.
It took the film crew three expeditions to get to the rest of the
plane. Sometimes it took them hours to walk just 100 meters. The plane
crash prompted the biggest search in Peruvian history, but nothing was
found. The forest is so dense that even helicopters could not spot the
plane wreckage, let alone a person.
After a while she stopped seeing or
hearing them. “I knew that I was truly on my own, and they wouldn’t
continue looking for me," she told Vice News.
For ten days, Koepcke followed the river, she mostly swam or walked and sometimes let herself be lead by the water. The whole time, Koepcke did not eat. She says in the documentary that she wasn't hungry
but drank a lot of water. The only food she found was a candy package
near the bodies she saw, and a Panettone, a type of sweet bread,
that was soaked and had mud all over it. It tasted so bad that she left
it where she found it.
Koepcke eventually found a hut, without walls, on the
ninth day of her trek through the jungle. She decided to spend a night
there. The next day — while she was lying there thinking she was going
to die — she suddenly heard voices. Three Peruvian men who lived in the
hut found her.
"The first man I saw seemed like an angel,” Koepcke told Herzog.
Koepcke eventually moved back to Germany for her studies and where she fully recovered from her injuries.
Coming into contact with her 'destiny'
During the documentary, it was the first
time Koepcke came in contact with her ‘destiny,’ and yet she seemed very
calm, the narrator noted. She later explained to him that it was part
of a shield — a coping mechanism that she had developed to try to lead a
normal life and to be able to do that cost her an enormous effort
during her whole adult life.
Going back to the crash site with Herzog, however, was almost therapeutic, Koepcke told Vice News.
“It helped me psychologically. That’s
where I told the whole story to Herzog. I really focused on it, on doing
it well, so I didn’t really have the time to become upset,” she said.
Despite overcoming the experience, nightmares plagued Koepcke for many years. She had one recurring dream where she's walking through
the streets of cities. Everything seems normal but suddenly all the
faces of people are broken. In another one, a room stores all the
butterflies in the world. She said in the documentary it was as if all
the planes in the world were safely stored away there and couldn't hurt
her anymore.
In
the documentary, Koepcke also talks about grieving her mother's death.
They had always been close, and it took her a very long time to
comprehend that someone who has always been there was now gone forever.
Although Koepcke feels she managed to deal
with the extraordinary and dramatic event that shaped her life, there is
one thought, she told Vice News, that will never leave her.
"The thought — why was I the only survivor? — haunts me. It always will."
NOW WATCH: This animation collects and analyzes all the theories behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
end quote from:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/woman-describes-only-survivor-flight-133000712.html
end quote from:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/woman-describes-only-survivor-flight-133000712.html
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