Juliane Köpcke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Juliane Diller (born 1954 in Lima
as Juliane Margaret Köpcke) is best known for being the sole
survivor of 93 passengers and crew in the December 24, 1971, crash of
(a LANSA
Lockheed
Electra OBLANSA
Flight 508-R-941 commercial airliner) in
the Peruvian
rainforest.
Juliane Köpcke was a German high school senior
studying in Lima, intending to become a zoologist,
like her parents. She and her mother, famed ornithologist
Maria Köpcke,
were traveling to meet with her father, biologist Hans-Wilhelm
Köpcke, who was working in Pucallpa.
The airplane was struck by lightning
during a severe thunderstorm
and exploded in mid-air, disintegrating 3.2 km up. Köpcke, who was
17 years old at the time, fell to earth still strapped into her seat.
She survived the fall with only a broken collarbone,
a gash to her right arm and her right eye swollen shut.
Her first priority was to find her mother, who had
been seated next to her on the plane but her search was unsuccessful.
She later found out her mother had died in the crash.
Köpcke was soon able to locate a small stream.
She then waded through knee-high water downstream from her landing
site, relying on the survival principle her father had taught her
that tracking downstream should eventually lead to civilization. The
stream also provided clean water and a natural path through the dense
rainforest vegetation. After
9 days, she found a canoe and a nearby shelter, where she waited.
Hours later, the lumbermen who resided in the shelter arrived and tended to her injuries & bug infestations. The next morning they took her via a 7-hour canoe ride down the river to a lumber station in Tournavista, from where she was airlifted with the help of a local pilot to her father and a hospital in Pucallpa.
Subsequent events
Her experience is the subject of two films, the
first being the 1974 Giuseppe
Maria Scotese film Miracoli accadono ancora, I (Miracles
Still Happen), and the most recent being the 2000 Werner
Herzog film Wings of
Hope. Herzog was inspired to make the film as he narrowly
avoided taking the very same flight while he was location
scouting for Aguirre,
Wrath of God. His reservation was canceled due to a last
minute change in itinerary.
Köpcke returned to Germany, where she fully
recovered from her injuries and continued her studies, eventually
earning a PhD degree in zoology,
like her parents, in 1987. Now known as Dr. Juliane Diller, she
specializes in mammalogy,
studying bats in Munich, Germany,
and working at the Munich Zoological Center, where she is a
librarian. Juliane Koepcke's memoir Als ich vom Himmel fiel
[When I Fell From the Sky] will be published on March 10, 2011 by the
German publisher Piper Malik.
TEXT COMPREHENSION
01- Juliane Diller lives in______________.
a)
Munich
b) Hamburg
c) Lima
d) Pucallpa
e) Cusco
02- Juliane's _________helped her survive immediately after the fall.
a) friends
b)
knowledge
c) seat
d) mom
e) dad
03- On the airplane, there were ___________
passengers.
a) ninety
one
b)
ninety two
c)
ninety three
d) ninety
four
e) ninety
five
04- The airplane crash happened in the ________________century.
a) seventeenth
b) eighteenth
c) nineteenth
d) twentieth
e) twenty
first
05- Check the correct alternative according to the text:
a) Aguirre,
Wrath of God is a film about the flight 508
b) The
air crash happened 49 years ago
c) Juliane
was rescued after seven days
d) Juliane's
dad was a victim of flight 508 too
e)
The air crash happened on Christmas Eve
06-Choose the correct sentence according to the text:
a) Juliane
is fifty five years old
b) Juliane
lives in Peru nowadays
c) The
flight was from Lima to Berlin
d) Juliane
escaped 'cos she had a parachute
e) juliane's
memoir was published by Piper Malik.