Reader Shawn sent me this article after he noticed a couple interesting lines.
The setup: Juliane Koepcke is getting aboard a flight with her mother on Christmas Eve in 1971:
The flight was supposed to last for less than an hour and for the first 25 minutes everything was fine, Koepcke recalled.
“Then we flew into heavy clouds and the plane started shaking. My mother was very nervous. Then to the right we saw a bright flash and the plane went into a nose dive. My mother said, ‘This is it!'”
An accident investigation later found that one of the fuel tanks of the Lockheed Electra had been hit by a bolt of lightning which had torn the right wing off.
“We were headed straight down. Christmas presents were flying around the cabin and I could hear people screaming.”
Koepcke fell two miles into the jungle and managed to survive.
In any other article, that’d be called a miracle and someone would be invoking the name of God…
What did Koepcke say?
Koepcke says she is not a spiritual person and has tried to find logical explanations for why she survived.
“Maybe it was the fact that I was still attached to a whole row of seats,” she says. “It was rotating much like the helicopter and that might have slowed the fall. Also, the place I landed had very thick foliage and that might have lessened the impact.”
Wow. Lucky and rational. I love it.
(Thanks to Shawn and Jeff for the link!)