August 8, 2025 • 38 mins
Strapped aboard plane wreckage hurtling uncontrollably towards Earth, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke had a fleeting thought as she glimpsed the ground 1,000 feet, or 3,000 metres, below her. The trees in the dense Peruvian rainforest looked like heads of broccoli, she thought, while falling towards them.
A wild thunderstorm had destroyed the plane she was travelling in, and the row of seats Juliane was still harnessed to twirled through the air as it fell. She lost consciousness, assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon trees would be her last.
But then, Juliane woke up.
Sources cited within the episode
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/autumn-s-oddities--5307439/support.
A wild thunderstorm had destroyed the plane she was travelling in, and the row of seats Juliane was still harnessed to twirled through the air as it fell. She lost consciousness, assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon trees would be her last.
But then, Juliane woke up.
Sources cited within the episode
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/autumn-s-oddities--5307439/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, hey, welcome back to Autumn's Oddities. I am Autumn.
Well this is an appropriate episode considering that I just
got back from traveling for forty eight hours straight and
by straight, I mean I drove sixteen hours to Austin.
I did not sleep even once at all, immediately got
(00:55):
on the first of two flights for a total of
over ten hours of travel and layovers. I may be
slept for like an hour like here and there. I've
had a day to recover, you know, it's all I
really give myself. And I am ready to talk about
surviving plane crashes. It's finally time. Oh. Also, congratulations to
(01:17):
my sister Tessa and her husband on their beautiful new
squishy baby angel creature. I cannot wait to meet her
this weekend. Without further ado, I bring you our worst fears,
probably most of our worst fears come to life the
incredible survivor story of Julianne Cookca. And I mean I
(01:40):
don't mean like it's everybody's nightmare to survive a plane crash.
It's to be in one in the first place. Statistics
tell us that flying is safer than traveling, you know,
by most other forms of transport, such as by car
or boat. And if you drive now, and you know
have been driving for some years, you do indeed know
that driving in the age of cell phones and touch
screen technology is about as perilous as it freaking kids.
(02:04):
But when you read news reports about aircraft disasters like
the most recent plane crash in India or international tragedies
such as MH seventeen, you might have second thoughts. You know,
plane crashes happen, and even though it might seem unlikely,
surviving one is possible. Tell me how one of the
most unbelievable plane crashes with one survivor involves the story
(02:28):
of Julianne Kupka. She was only seventeen years old when
Lansa Flight five oh eight, which was a Lockheed L
one eight eight, a Electra turboprop for a lot of words,
crashed into the Amazon rainforest. The domestic flight was scheduled
to travel from Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima to
(02:49):
Colonel FAP Francisco Sakata Vignetta International Airport in Iquitos. Despite
warnings of severe weather, the flight took off anyway on
Decider twenty fourth, as scheduled, just twenty five minutes after takeoff,
the plane flew directly into a thunderstorm and began to
(03:09):
experience extreme turbulence, as did I coming home to Louisville.
My final flight were like there, They're like, okay, we're
we're getting our final descent, you know, they're giving that shpiel.
Ten minutes later, I'm like, why aren't we landing? It
feels kind of like we're going higher, And indeed we were.
There was severe weather like closer to the airport and
(03:31):
they were not allowing any flights to land, and we
quite literally circled in the air for forty five minutes.
And this is after I've already been awake for about
forty eight hours. When I got off, I was sick,
Like you know, if you get off a boat and
you get seasickness, which I do occasionally, like if I
don't take a drama, mean, you know how it feels
(03:51):
like you're still on a boat and you're like wavingside
to side. Well, I was doing that, like getting off
on the tarmac, I was waiting. I was like, I'm
not drunk, I swear, I'm just incredibly sleep deprived and
freaking sick. Like everybody had their heads in their laps.
It was pretty freaking miserable, but at least we didn't crash.
A bolt of lightning ended up striking the aircraft and
(04:12):
it nose dived, strapped aboard plane wreckage, hurtling uncontrollably towards earth.
Seventeen year old Julianne Kupka had a fleeting thought as
she glimpsed to the ground one thousand feet or roughly
three thousand meters below her. The trees in the dense
Peruvian forest looked like heads of broccoli. You know what
(04:34):
a strange little thought you know to have while falling
towards them at roughly one hundred and fifty feet or
forty five meters per second, so falling really freaking fast.
She lost consciousness, assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon
trees would be her last. But then Julianne woke up.
(04:55):
The jungle canopy was above her, and that's no, it's
not how supposed to be the other way around. She's
supposed to be up in the air, the trees are
supposed to be down there, and narry, the two shall meet.
It was Christmas Day, nineteen seventy one, and Julianne dressed
in a torn sleeveless mini dress and one sandal, had
(05:15):
somehow survived a nearly two mile or three kilometer fall
to earth with only minor injuries. And I say minor,
you know, they're pretty bad, But they're minor for surviving
a freaking plane crash strapped to your seat. Walking away
from such a fall bordered on miraculous. But the teen's
(05:37):
fight for life was only just beginning. She had crashed
landed in Peru in a jungle riddled with fun things
like venomous snakes, mosquitoes my least favorite, and spiders. I
don't mind spiders. I hate mosquitoes. I get destroyed by them.
Apparently they love my blood type oh negative, and my
(05:58):
daughter gets she's like allergic as to them, swells up
from the bites, like so much so that we've had
to take her to urgent treatment and get steroid shots
when she got freaking bitten on her face. Oh yeah,
I'm also recording a video of this. We're gonna see
how it works. I'm trying it out. My podcast recording
software just started offering this, like simultaneously recording video and audio.
(06:19):
So go and give it a try. We're gonna see
how it goes. I hope it works. I'm gonna let
you know. If it doesn't work out so well, I'm
gonna lose my ever loving shit because let me tell you,
it took all my strength much. No, I'm not gonna
give no, Oh, dear Lord Autumn, I'm not going to
compare the struggle that I went through, you know, for
(06:40):
forty eight hours and then writing and recording to this
teenage girl at the times incredible story of survival, and
I most certainly would not have survived so good on
her returning to civilization meant that this brilliant young woman,
the daughter of two famous zoologists, would need to find
her own way out. Julianne was born in Lima, Peru,
(07:03):
on October tenth, nineteen fifty four. She was the only
child of German zoologists Maria and Hans Bilheim Kupka. Her
father was a renowned zoologist like I said, and her
mother was a scientist who studied tropical birds. When Julianne
was born, both of her parents were working for Lima's
Natural History or the Museum of Natural History. Together, they
(07:26):
set up a biological research station called Panguana so they
could immerse themselves in the lush rainforest's ecosystem when Julianne
was just fourteen. It was there that she learned the
survival skills that would eventually save her life. Julianne became
a self described jungle child, which sounds pretty freaking sweet.
(07:47):
As she grew up on the station, I learned a
lot about life in the rainforest that it wasn't too dangerous,
she said in a BBC interview in twenty twelve. It's
not the green hell the world always thinks, and I
like that turn of phrase, the green hell, and really, yeah,
when I think of the Amason, I'm like, I would
last about thirty seconds out there. I hate being hot,
I hate humidity, I hate mosquitos. I would probably just
(08:10):
lay there and be like, take me, let the earth
absorb me back into itself and recycle my energy. Someone
go on. In nineteen seventy one, Julianne and her mother, Maria,
booked tickets to return to Panguana to join her father
for Christmas. Her mother wanted to get there early, she
wanted to leave earlier, but Julianne really wanted to attend
(08:32):
her Year twelve dance and graduation ceremony as she had
just finished her school exam. So she finished school, it's
about to be Christmas time, she wants to go to
the festivities, and they take this last second flight. Their
only option was to fly out on Christmas Eve on
Lance the flight five oh eight, which was again a
(08:53):
turboprop airliner that could carry ninety nine people. And I
don't know a ton about planes, but I know that
prop planes propeller planes are pretty freaking small. Julianne's father
knew the Lockheed L one eighty eight electraplane had a
terrible reputation. Of one hundred and seventy eight elektras built,
(09:15):
so this particular style of plane, fifty eight were written
off after they crashed or suffered extreme malfunctions mid air,
so he's like, don't take this flight. He urged them
to find an alternative rout but with Christmas literally the
next day, Julianne and Maria decided to book their tickets
in the flight, you know, and initially seemed like any other.
(09:38):
Placed in the second row from the back, Julianne took
the window seat while her mother sat in the middle.
They ate their sandwiches, which is really nice it didn't
seem like a very long flight, and they get sandwiches.
I got nothing. I got absolutely nothing. Thanks Spirit Airlines.
I had to take Spirit. I had no choice. I
also took a budget airline. So they ate their sandwiches
and they looked at the rainforest from the window beside them.
(10:00):
But fifteen minutes before they were supposed to land, the
sky suddenly grew black. Daylight turns tonight, and lightning flashes
from all directions. People gasp as the plane shakes violently.
Julianne wrote in her memoir it's originally written in German.
She speaks German. The English title is when I Fell
(10:21):
from the Sky. I used it in researching this episode,
pretty much all I used because when I looked at
other sources about Julianne's ordeal, their information was different from hers.
And I'm like, Okay, I think the person who survived
the crash probably knows what she went through better than
some random ass news Outlet bags, wrapped gifts and clothing
(10:44):
fall from overhead lockers, Sandwich trays soar through the air,
and half finished drinks spill onto passengers heads. People scream
and cry. And that's again from her memoir Maria. Her
mother was a nervous flyer, and she murmured to no
one in particular, I hope this goes all right. Ominous,
Julianne recalled seeing a huge flash of white light. You know,
(11:06):
she would later realize that that was a lightning strike.
It was over the plane's wing that seemed to plunge
the aircraft into a nose dive, and it had in
fact hit the wing of the plane. Now it's all over,
Julianne remembered her mother saying, in an eerily calm voice.
Then the screams of the other passengers and the thundering
(11:27):
roar of the engine seemed to vanish. Julianne, who is
now doctor Kupka, said, the next thing I knew, I
was no longer inside the cabin. I was outside, in
the open air. I hadn't left the plane. The plane
had left me. Dear God, I refuse to imagine it.
(11:48):
Kupka fell approximately ten thousand feet still in her seat belt,
connected to a bench with three seats. Julianne, likely the
only one in her row ring a seat belt, spiraled
down into the heart of the Amazon, totally alone. Miraculously,
some ten hours later, she surmised she awoke alive on
(12:10):
the jungle floor, where she assessed her injuries. She had
a damaged eye due to the sudden change in air pressure,
it had burst the capillaries in her eye. Besides her eye,
she was suffering from a broken collarbone, a deep cut
to her arm, and a severe concussion. And I should
mention that she also needed eyeglasses, and she could not
find her eyeglasses. So she's out there pretty much blind, injured,
(12:34):
with one shoe in a mini dress in the rainforest,
and she's seventeen. Not that that makes her any less capable,
but good god, you know, if I think of myself
at age seventeen being in this situation again, I would
just lay down, be like, Okay, go ahead, absorb me
into the ground, take me back. She said. She spent
(12:54):
the rest of the day dropping in and out of consciousness,
too injured and weak to remove herself from the seat
that she was still strapped to, and again her mother
wasn't next to her, but I'm sure at that point
she couldn't form much of a coherent thought, she said.
She lay there almost like an embryo for the rest
of the day, and a whole night until the next morning,
(13:14):
when she eventually regained her strength. Her first priority was
to locate her mother, but without her glasses, Julianne found
it difficult to orient herself. And you know, it was
her first priority. She just really couldn't get a handle
on it. But her mother, Maria, a passionate animal lover
and you know scientist, had bestowed upon her child a
(13:36):
gift that would help save her. She could identify the
croaks of frogs and the calls of birds around her,
and she said, she immediately recognized the sounds of wildlife
from Panguana and realized that she was in the same jungle,
and I'm like shit, that is lucky. She was not
far from home, but one wrong turn and she could
(13:57):
walk deeper and deeper into the world's large rainforest. She
said there was almost nothing that her parents hadn't taught
her about the jungle, and that she only had to
find that knowledge in her concussion fogged head. Julianne finally
did pry herself from her plane seat and stumbled blindly forward.
She found a packet of lollipops that must have fallen
(14:19):
from the plane, and she walked along a river just
as her parents had always taught her. Her father had
warned her that piranhas were only dangerous in shallow water,
so she kind of like conserved her energy and began
to float midstream, hoping that eventually she would encounter other
human beings. The jungle was in the midst of its
(14:40):
wet season, so it just rained on her relentlessly. Everything
was like just slightly too damp for her to start
a fire, and no trees bore fruit, so there was
really nothing for her to eat, and she said that
much of what grows in the jungle is poisonous, so
she just kept her hands off anything that she didn't recognize.
And her parents weren't botanists, you know, they taught her
how to survive out there. They were zoologists. They knew
(15:02):
more about animals and you know, birds and things like
that and fish than you know, what you could eat
out in the jungle. I'm sure they taught her a
little about that, but again she said, if she didn't
recognize that, she did not touch it. The next eight
days were spent weekly clamoring through the jungle with just
you know, some sweets that she had recovered from the
wreckage as sustenance. On her fourth day of trudging through
(15:26):
the Amazon, the call of king vultures struck fear in Julianne.
The scavengers she knew, only circled in great numbers when
something had died, and the call of those birds led
Julianne to a ghoulish scene. She found three passengers still
strapped to their row of seats, and they had hit
(15:48):
the ground with such force that they were half buried
in the earth, just like sticking out. And I know
that this was just you know, hope, you know, and
checking for her mother. There were three people in that row.
There were only three seats in the row. She and
her mother had been sitting in a row, so this
most likely could not have been her mother. But she
(16:08):
checked anyway because one of the passengers was a woman,
and she went to look at her toes, which probably
sounds strange, but she said that her mother never polished
her finger or toenails, and so she took a deep
breath because she knew that was not her mother. Julianne
could hear the rescue planes above searching for her, but
you know, the forests that canopy kept her hidden. She
(16:30):
was sunburned starving and weak, and by the tenth day
of her trek she was ready to give up. Ice
cold drops pelt me, soaking my thin summer dress. The
wind makes me shiver to the core. On those bleak nights,
as I cower under a tree or in a bush,
I feel utterly abandoned, she wrote. But around a bend
(16:51):
in the river she saw her salvation, a small hut
with a palm leaf roof. Inside she found a can
of gasoline and the gash in her shoulder. This is
lucky that she found. It was just infested with maggots. Yeah,
I know, it's not a pretty picture. So she poured
the gas over the wound, just as her father had
(17:13):
done for a family dog. She said the pain was
intense as the maggots tried to burrow further into the wound.
Good Lord, and she managed to pull out about thirty
maggots and was very proud of herself. I would be
too again. I'd just say take me, take me, maggots.
I'll become one of you. I'll assimilate well, I'll live together.
I'll become gigantic botfly. And she decided to go ahead
(17:35):
and spend the night in that hut, which is a
really good call. Just amazing that she was able to
find it. The next day, she awoke to the sound
of men's voices and rushed from the hut. The local
Peruvian fishermen, though they were terrified by the sight of
the skinny, dirty blonde girl. Remember she is a white,
(17:56):
blonde girl out in the middle of this. They thought
she was a kind of water apparently, a mythological figure
from local legend who is a hybrid of a water
dolphin and a blonde, white skinned woman. And I'm like,
what are the freaking odds. These guys were probably so
freaked out. I'd have been like, worship me, take me
back to civilization immediately. I would like to be worshiped
(18:18):
as a deity. But Julianne's parents, they had given her
one final key to her survival. They taught her Spanish.
Thank God, so these guys don't think she's some sort
of dolphin scary white lady. God, she said, I'm a
girl who was in the lancea crash. Yeah, my name
(18:40):
is Julianne. The following day, after a seven hour boat ride,
she arrived at a small missionary facility, where she remained
for several days, receiving medical attention and food, and finally
she was able to take a flight. I cannot believe
she got on another plane to her original destination of
Pucalpa to finally meet with her father. After recovering from
(19:03):
her own injuries, Julianne assisted search parties in locating the
crash site and recovering the victim's bodies. Her mother's body
was discovered on January twelfth, nineteen seventy two. Kupka returned
to her parents native West Germany, which you know, that's
what it was at the time they were separated, where
she fully recovered from her injuries. Like her parents. She
(19:25):
studied biology at the University of Kiel and graduated in
nineteen eighty. She received a doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy.
You know, mammals things that feed their babies with their
breasts and have wounds and give birth vaginally. If you
(19:46):
needed to know what that was, I just felt like
saying all of it. Congratulations, Tessa, Hey Jesus. She published
her thesis, Ecological Study of a Bat colony in the
Tropical Rainforest of Peru in eighteen eighty seven. This woman
is better than me and literally every way. Not only
did she get back on a plane like immediately after
(20:07):
surviving a plane crash, but she went back to the
site of her tragedy. But she also indeed did grow
up there, so I kind of get it. In nineteen
eighty nine, Kupka married Eric Diller, a German entomologist who
specializes in parasitic wasps? Does he specialize on how to
get rid of him? In two thousand, following the death
(20:28):
of her father, he lived that much longer, she took
over as the director of Penguana. She currently serves as
a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.
Cupka's or autobiography When I Fell from the Sky How
the Jungle Gave Me My Life Back, was released in
twenty eleven. The book won that year's Corn Literature Prize,
(20:52):
which I had not heard of before. In twenty nineteen,
the government of Peru made her a Grand Officer of
the Order of Merit for distinguish services. Not only did
she survive a plane crash, but she took authorities to
the side of the plane crash and aided in their
search for survivors. Of all ninety two passengers and crew,
(21:12):
Julianne was the sole survivor. This is extremely sad. It
was later discovered that fourteen of her fellow passengers, her
mother included, had survived the fall, but they had perished
in the following days awaiting rescue. And it's not like
they all crashed in one place. The plane broke apart,
the seats flew out of it and scattered all over
(21:34):
the place. I don't know if she would have been
able to find her mother in the condition that she
was in, And I think that's why she carried on
the way that she did, you know, just going down
the river, trying to get back to civilization, because she's like,
what am I even going to do if I find
my mom out there? Like I'm going to succumb to
these wounds eventually, Like they weren't serious enough to die
from immediately, but you know, the infection that she would
(21:55):
have most certainly gotten probably would have caused her to
go into se and die, and then who's she helping?
So I think she realized that the best she could
do was to get to civilization and get help and
hopefully someone had survived, and they had, but it was
just you know, too long they succumbed from their injuries.
(22:15):
Fourteen people survived, though, and just laid out there, which
is incredibly sad. The remains of the plane can still
be found the original crash site, but thankfully the bodies
of all the passengers have been recovered thanks to Julianne's help,
and they were laid to rest in a cemetery in
yarn A, Coca. I'm sorry, I know I'm missing it.
(22:37):
So how and why did Julianne survive? I don't know,
I mean really, I can only think that her wilderness
training and familiarity you know, about the area and what
she was in helped save her life. But how did
she physically survive that crash? And I guess it might
not have been that strange because fourteen other people did
as well and eventually died just from lack of medical treatment.
(23:01):
Over the years, Julianne herself has struggled to understand how
she came to be the only survivor of Lance Flight
five oh eight. All of the other people, including her
mother Maria, died in the crash, and again it is
believed that those fourteen people survived the impact, but just
weren't well enough to know trek out of the jungle
like Julianne had. The cause of the crash was officially
(23:23):
listed as an intentional decision by the airline to send
the plane into hazardous weather conditions. So yikes. Julianne later
learned this is horrendous that the aircraft was made entirely
from spare parts of other planes. Good God, like, it's willful, willful,
(23:45):
good Lord. I can't say enough about it. With her survival, though,
Julianne joined a small club. Dozens of people have fallen
from planes and walked away relatively unscathed. I'm going to
touch on a couple of them and then get to
the most recent one. A twenty three year old Serbian
flight attendant, Vesna Vulovi, survived the world's longest known fall
(24:06):
from a plane without a parachute. Just one year after Julianne.
A mid air explosion in nineteen seventy two saw Besna
plummet nine kilome snow in Czechoslovakia. She suffered a skull fracture,
two broken legs, and broken back. And I've got to
say again, really, not that bad. It is bad, Like
(24:26):
do I want those injuries? Absolutely not. But if I
sustain them falling out of a plane and I lived,
I would be cool with it. Just this year, in fact,
in June, shortly after news broke that an Air India
flight had crashed into the city of am Oh. Lord, uh,
let's see Ahmedabad, Ahmedabod. There we go. I got it,
am medapod. I'm sorry. I do look these up and
(24:48):
then I forget how to say them. I even like
write it out phonetically, and then I just blow it.
The video started circulating on social media showing a man
walking from the scene in a bloodstained shirt. Then it
emerged that that man was the lone survivor, a British
national of Indian origin identified as vishwash Kumar Ramesh. Thirty
(25:09):
seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and then
the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly, and that's
what he said while he was being treated at the
freaking hospital after surviving a plane crash. This is very
sad as well. He had been visiting family and was
returning to the UK with his brother who had been
sitting in a different row and he didn't know at
(25:31):
the time of his brother had survived. Are India later
confirmed that of the two hundred forty two people on
board the flight, two hundred and forty one had died,
making Ramesh the sole survivor. His cousin A. J. Valgi
told reporters and uh, I can't remember how to say that.
I think it's Leicester, England, that Ramesh had called his
(25:52):
family to tell them he's fine, adding that they were
upset about his brother and all of the others who died.
Of I mean, of course they are. Can you imagine
and that kind of survivor's guilt though like again, no way,
in no way, shape or form, was any of that
his fault. But living while your brother dies and two
hundred and other two hundred and forty other people beside
(26:12):
your brother, I cannot imagine truly. A doctor told CNN
that Ramesh's condition was not very critical and that he
could be released in the next couple days. They said,
he has some blood in the images, but he's not
very badly injured. He's very comfortable and under stripped observation
with no issues. And I mean again, he's totally fine.
(26:33):
Indian news outlets shared a photo of Ramesha's boarding pass
which indicates that he was in seat eleven A of
the flight, in the emergency exit row, just in front
of the plane's left wing, and she was also sitting.
Julianne was also sitting by the left wing of the plane,
albeit a totally different model of plane. Yeah, that's strange,
(26:55):
so Sienna and safety analyst and former US Federal Aviation
Administration safety inspector David Sushi, and that's how his name is,
said express surprise that someone seated at that part of
the plane would survive such a crash. He said that
the seat is right where the spar of the wing
would go under, and it would be a solid place
for the aircraft to hit the ground. But as far
(27:16):
as survivability above it, that is incredibly surprising, because that
was my first thought is, you know, it's got to
be like the positioning of the seat on the plane
or the row that you're sitting in, or YadA YadA.
I'm sure it's like one hundred different tiny little things,
you know, in some sort of final destination like scenario
that led to any of these people being able to
(27:37):
survive a plane crash with fairly minor injuries. Ramesh said
that he escaped through a small space near the door
by his seat. His hand was burned by the flames
as he fled from the aircraft. He said that he
didn't know how he managed to escape, and that he
also saw other passengers die in front of him, and
he said for some time that he thought he was
(27:58):
also going to die, but when he opened his eyes
realized he was alive, and he tried to unbuckle himself
from the seat and just escaped any way he could,
and he did so. When this plane crashed, people inside
the BJ Medical College and hospital Hostile were also killed.
The plane crashed into it, which is just wild. The
(28:21):
plane was headed for London's Gatwick Airport and was carrying Indian, British, Canadian,
and Portuguese nationals, so surviving what most would consider unsurvivable
is truly incredible. But how did they survive again? Was
it a particular seat that they were sat in, or
the section of the plane, or were the wind conditions
(28:43):
just right, or you know, did they were they relaxed
when they hit and didn't brace themselves. Julianne was one
of the only people that was buckled in her row,
so they believe that's how she survived. But you know
the rest of it, it's some sort of a miracle
that any of them lived. But still, you know, they're
all still here, and no one can quite explain why.
(29:05):
Julianne herself has several theories about how she made it
back in one piece. And I kind of like this,
She wonders, if perhaps the powerful updraft of the thunderstorm
slowed her descent, and if the thick canopy of leaves
beneath cushioned her landing. Now a biologist, she sees the
world just as her parents did. In her mind. Her
(29:26):
plane seat spun like the seed of a maple leaf,
which twirls like a tiny helicopter through the air with
remarkable grace. If you've never seen, we call them helicopters.
Like I know, I said tiny helicopter, but we call
them helicopters in Kentucky. It's like a little seed pod
on the end, like kind of a noble little seed pod.
It's got like a little tail, like a little wing,
(29:48):
one singular little thing, and when it falls from the tree,
it spins like that, like it's flat, and it just
like spins round and round, and lands gently on the ground.
She said, the forces of nature are usually too great
for any living thing to overcome, but sometimes, very rarely,
fate favors a tiny creature, an upward draft, a benevolent
(30:10):
canopy of leaves, and pure luck can conspire to deliver
someone safely back to Earth, like a maple seed. And
that girl in particular. Julianne grew up to be a scientist,
renowned for her study of bats. She still runs Panguana,
her family's legacy that stands proudly in the forest that
transformed her. She said, the jungle is as much a
(30:30):
part of me as my love for my husband, the
music of the people who live along the Amazon and
its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash,
and that is it. That is the wild, insane, uplifting,
really something we all need right now. Survival tale of
Julianne Cupka, the teenager who survived a plane crash in
(30:54):
the Amazon, And I think her theory about, you know,
her seat coming down, and I think maybe just the
way the seat fell she did kind of just spin, spin, spin.
She lost consciousness, so she doesn't know and also woke
up with a concussion. She may have some sort of
memory loss, I don't know, but that's she survived. She
(31:16):
woke up like you can you imagine, like try try
to imagine that, like just sitting on a plane. I
mean it was just on one sitting on a plane.
All of a sudden, white light, big noise. You can
feel the plane os diving and all of a sudden,
like plane just breaks apart, and you're like traveling as
though you're wonder woman in an invisible airplane. All you
(31:39):
see is the freaking seat. And when you wake up, shockingly,
you wake up, you see the canopy of the Amazon
rainforest above your head. Again, she wouldn't have been that
scared because she was from there, but most people would
have shit themselves right then and there and again just taken,
taken my strategy. Lay on the ground. Oh god, there's
(32:02):
a camera on, isn't there. We lay on the ground,
Let it just absorb you back in. I'd be like,
make it quick something, Come eat me, please, big snake,
go ahead and digest me. I'm cool. But oh she didn't.
She knew like practically everything about where she was at,
and she amazingly survived and then got on a fucking
(32:25):
plane to go see her father. I'm again better than me,
But like she probably thinks, well, what are the odds
is that's gonna happen to me again? That's the worst
thing that could possibly happen when I get on a plane.
Is it crashing? And it happened, so what are the
odds of it ever happening to me again? And I mean,
she's right, but I don't know. I would probably never
(32:47):
ever set there on a plane again. I would probably
become a reclose and again be like, this is has
to be like a final destination scenario. I know that
movie wasn't out back then, but I'd be like, this
is a final destination scenario. I was definitely supposed to die.
Death is coming for me. I will build a fortress.
I will outrun death. But I really wouldn't. I just
(33:08):
be like, a fuck it, take me, You're gonna take me,
take me anyway, Take me now. I'm sorry, I just
kicked my own chair. I think camera on is really
really weird. I can't see myself at least, but I'm
kind of horrified by what you can see because I
do indeed pull a lot of ices. I really it
(33:29):
would just be speculation, guessing, like how anyone survives some
sort of insane tragedy, like you know, a trained derailment,
a plane crash, you know, they walk away from a
car that's smashed in half or anything like that. It's
just really truly unbelievable because human bodies are so breaking fragile.
(33:53):
We are not like hearty in the slightest, like our
whole body are just freaking meat sacks held together by
a bunch of calcified bone. And we die easily, we
injure easily. I get a bruise, like from sitting still,
I probably have gotten eight bruises during this recording. I
do move around a lot though. Either way it you
(34:18):
can really only speculate how something like that happens. But
it is amazing. It is a feel good story, which is,
you know something in this genre of podcast, I feel
that I don't get to do enough. And while she
did endure something really horrible and she lost her mother,
she frames it as something that shaped her entire life,
(34:41):
and it indeed it did. She went on to you know,
continue running her family's legacy and probably living life for
her mother and everyone else that crashed on that plane
and she made sure that they were all found. She
made sure they were all found. Like I mean, they're
all like bonded forever, even though they're gone. They all
experienced one thing that nobody else has ever or will
(35:04):
ever experience. You know, on that particular flight, they all
died in the same place. She knew where they were,
She took them back, and she probably feels that she
owes them like some sort of a life debt. And
I just hope that she personally did not find her mother,
but there probably wasn't much left. You know. The rainforest
is extremely hot, which does speed up decomposition, and there
(35:25):
are lots and lots and lots of predators. So I
would hope that when her mother was recovered that she didn't,
you know, have to have to see anything that would
that would let her recognize her, because that would I
think that would change my experience if I if I
survived a plane crash and had to see that, I
just be like, well, I don't, I don't want to anymore.
I'm just gonna I'm gonna dig and dig myself into
(35:47):
a hole and live there forever. Either way. I'm seriously,
this is an incredible story. I'd heard it before. I
didn't know all the details. I was just like, holy crap,
just like a regular seventeen year old girl survived a
plane crash in the freaking Amazon. How'd she do that? Well,
she had a whole lot of training. And I not
trying to make this about me, but I say what,
(36:11):
I started recently studying herbs and flowers and whatnot, just
to see, like what is poisonous, what you can't eat?
Like you never freaking know. I did go to like
a survival camp when I was a kid for a
while in the Black Mountains in North Carolina, so I
know a little bit. But I'm just like, you never
freaking know when something like that could come in handy.
(36:31):
I'm well trained and you know, advanced life saving and
all that stuff, but like foraging and poisonous animals and plants,
I'm like, I need to know what these things are really,
mostly in my area because you know, that's where I'm at.
But if I were traveling, say, over top of the
(36:52):
freaking Amazon, I might look those things up too, and
just be like, just in case, like that saund's gonna happen,
but just in case, I'll be prepared, all right, Well,
If you enjoyed this episode, you can hear more on Fridays.
Episodes are really every Friday on all podcast hosting platforms. Yeah,
that's right. On social media, you can find me on
(37:13):
Instagram at Autumn Podcast, on threads at Autumn Podcast, Facebook
at autumns Audities, and Patreon at autumns Oddities. Any level
of paid subscription gets you ad free episodes, gets you
a little treasure trove of unreleased to the public episodes,
so you know, I know, I've downsized my format from
two episodes a week to one. If you miss me,
(37:35):
if you want to hear me more often, get on there.
There's some episodes that you can listen to. Oh God,
my computer is trying to die. Let's don't do that.
As always, I appreciate you listening, and remember, if it's
creepy and weird, you'll find it here. The tend
Hey, hey, welcome back to Autumn's Oddities. I am Autumn.
Well this is an appropriate episode considering that I just
got back from traveling for forty eight hours straight and
by straight, I mean I drove sixteen hours to Austin.
I did not sleep even once at all, immediately got
(00:55):
on the first of two flights for a total of
over ten hours of travel and layovers. I may be
slept for like an hour like here and there. I've
had a day to recover, you know, it's all I
really give myself. And I am ready to talk about
surviving plane crashes. It's finally time. Oh. Also, congratulations to
(01:17):
my sister Tessa and her husband on their beautiful new
squishy baby angel creature. I cannot wait to meet her
this weekend. Without further ado, I bring you our worst fears,
probably most of our worst fears come to life the
incredible survivor story of Julianne Cookca. And I mean I
(01:40):
don't mean like it's everybody's nightmare to survive a plane crash.
It's to be in one in the first place. Statistics
tell us that flying is safer than traveling, you know,
by most other forms of transport, such as by car
or boat. And if you drive now, and you know
have been driving for some years, you do indeed know
that driving in the age of cell phones and touch
screen technology is about as perilous as it freaking kids.
(02:04):
But when you read news reports about aircraft disasters like
the most recent plane crash in India or international tragedies
such as MH seventeen, you might have second thoughts. You know,
plane crashes happen, and even though it might seem unlikely,
surviving one is possible. Tell me how one of the
most unbelievable plane crashes with one survivor involves the story
(02:28):
of Julianne Kupka. She was only seventeen years old when
Lansa Flight five oh eight, which was a Lockheed L
one eight eight, a Electra turboprop for a lot of words,
crashed into the Amazon rainforest. The domestic flight was scheduled
to travel from Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima to
(02:49):
Colonel FAP Francisco Sakata Vignetta International Airport in Iquitos. Despite
warnings of severe weather, the flight took off anyway on
Decider twenty fourth, as scheduled, just twenty five minutes after takeoff,
the plane flew directly into a thunderstorm and began to
(03:09):
experience extreme turbulence, as did I coming home to Louisville.
My final flight were like there, They're like, okay, we're
we're getting our final descent, you know, they're giving that shpiel.
Ten minutes later, I'm like, why aren't we landing? It
feels kind of like we're going higher, And indeed we were.
There was severe weather like closer to the airport and
(03:31):
they were not allowing any flights to land, and we
quite literally circled in the air for forty five minutes.
And this is after I've already been awake for about
forty eight hours. When I got off, I was sick,
Like you know, if you get off a boat and
you get seasickness, which I do occasionally, like if I
don't take a drama, mean, you know how it feels
(03:51):
like you're still on a boat and you're like wavingside
to side. Well, I was doing that, like getting off
on the tarmac, I was waiting. I was like, I'm
not drunk, I swear, I'm just incredibly sleep deprived and
freaking sick. Like everybody had their heads in their laps.
It was pretty freaking miserable, but at least we didn't crash.
A bolt of lightning ended up striking the aircraft and
(04:12):
it nose dived, strapped aboard plane wreckage, hurtling uncontrollably towards earth.
Seventeen year old Julianne Kupka had a fleeting thought as
she glimpsed to the ground one thousand feet or roughly
three thousand meters below her. The trees in the dense
Peruvian forest looked like heads of broccoli. You know what
(04:34):
a strange little thought you know to have while falling
towards them at roughly one hundred and fifty feet or
forty five meters per second, so falling really freaking fast.
She lost consciousness, assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon
trees would be her last. But then Julianne woke up.
(04:55):
The jungle canopy was above her, and that's no, it's
not how supposed to be the other way around. She's
supposed to be up in the air, the trees are
supposed to be down there, and narry, the two shall meet.
It was Christmas Day, nineteen seventy one, and Julianne dressed
in a torn sleeveless mini dress and one sandal, had
(05:15):
somehow survived a nearly two mile or three kilometer fall
to earth with only minor injuries. And I say minor,
you know, they're pretty bad, But they're minor for surviving
a freaking plane crash strapped to your seat. Walking away
from such a fall bordered on miraculous. But the teen's
(05:37):
fight for life was only just beginning. She had crashed
landed in Peru in a jungle riddled with fun things
like venomous snakes, mosquitoes my least favorite, and spiders. I
don't mind spiders. I hate mosquitoes. I get destroyed by them.
Apparently they love my blood type oh negative, and my
(05:58):
daughter gets she's like allergic as to them, swells up
from the bites, like so much so that we've had
to take her to urgent treatment and get steroid shots
when she got freaking bitten on her face. Oh yeah,
I'm also recording a video of this. We're gonna see
how it works. I'm trying it out. My podcast recording
software just started offering this, like simultaneously recording video and audio.
(06:19):
So go and give it a try. We're gonna see
how it goes. I hope it works. I'm gonna let
you know. If it doesn't work out so well, I'm
gonna lose my ever loving shit because let me tell you,
it took all my strength much. No, I'm not gonna
give no, Oh, dear Lord Autumn, I'm not going to
compare the struggle that I went through, you know, for
(06:40):
forty eight hours and then writing and recording to this
teenage girl at the times incredible story of survival, and
I most certainly would not have survived so good on
her returning to civilization meant that this brilliant young woman,
the daughter of two famous zoologists, would need to find
her own way out. Julianne was born in Lima, Peru,
(07:03):
on October tenth, nineteen fifty four. She was the only
child of German zoologists Maria and Hans Bilheim Kupka. Her
father was a renowned zoologist like I said, and her
mother was a scientist who studied tropical birds. When Julianne
was born, both of her parents were working for Lima's
Natural History or the Museum of Natural History. Together, they
(07:26):
set up a biological research station called Panguana so they
could immerse themselves in the lush rainforest's ecosystem when Julianne
was just fourteen. It was there that she learned the
survival skills that would eventually save her life. Julianne became
a self described jungle child, which sounds pretty freaking sweet.
(07:47):
As she grew up on the station, I learned a
lot about life in the rainforest that it wasn't too dangerous,
she said in a BBC interview in twenty twelve. It's
not the green hell the world always thinks, and I
like that turn of phrase, the green hell, and really, yeah,
when I think of the Amason, I'm like, I would
last about thirty seconds out there. I hate being hot,
I hate humidity, I hate mosquitos. I would probably just
(08:10):
lay there and be like, take me, let the earth
absorb me back into itself and recycle my energy. Someone
go on. In nineteen seventy one, Julianne and her mother, Maria,
booked tickets to return to Panguana to join her father
for Christmas. Her mother wanted to get there early, she
wanted to leave earlier, but Julianne really wanted to attend
(08:32):
her Year twelve dance and graduation ceremony as she had
just finished her school exam. So she finished school, it's
about to be Christmas time, she wants to go to
the festivities, and they take this last second flight. Their
only option was to fly out on Christmas Eve on
Lance the flight five oh eight, which was again a
(08:53):
turboprop airliner that could carry ninety nine people. And I
don't know a ton about planes, but I know that
prop planes propeller planes are pretty freaking small. Julianne's father
knew the Lockheed L one eighty eight electraplane had a
terrible reputation. Of one hundred and seventy eight elektras built,
(09:15):
so this particular style of plane, fifty eight were written
off after they crashed or suffered extreme malfunctions mid air,
so he's like, don't take this flight. He urged them
to find an alternative rout but with Christmas literally the
next day, Julianne and Maria decided to book their tickets
in the flight, you know, and initially seemed like any other.
(09:38):
Placed in the second row from the back, Julianne took
the window seat while her mother sat in the middle.
They ate their sandwiches, which is really nice it didn't
seem like a very long flight, and they get sandwiches.
I got nothing. I got absolutely nothing. Thanks Spirit Airlines.
I had to take Spirit. I had no choice. I
also took a budget airline. So they ate their sandwiches
and they looked at the rainforest from the window beside them.
(10:00):
But fifteen minutes before they were supposed to land, the
sky suddenly grew black. Daylight turns tonight, and lightning flashes
from all directions. People gasp as the plane shakes violently.
Julianne wrote in her memoir it's originally written in German.
She speaks German. The English title is when I Fell
(10:21):
from the Sky. I used it in researching this episode,
pretty much all I used because when I looked at
other sources about Julianne's ordeal, their information was different from hers.
And I'm like, Okay, I think the person who survived
the crash probably knows what she went through better than
some random ass news Outlet bags, wrapped gifts and clothing
(10:44):
fall from overhead lockers, Sandwich trays soar through the air,
and half finished drinks spill onto passengers heads. People scream
and cry. And that's again from her memoir Maria. Her
mother was a nervous flyer, and she murmured to no
one in particular, I hope this goes all right. Ominous,
Julianne recalled seeing a huge flash of white light. You know,
(11:06):
she would later realize that that was a lightning strike.
It was over the plane's wing that seemed to plunge
the aircraft into a nose dive, and it had in
fact hit the wing of the plane. Now it's all over,
Julianne remembered her mother saying, in an eerily calm voice.
Then the screams of the other passengers and the thundering
(11:27):
roar of the engine seemed to vanish. Julianne, who is
now doctor Kupka, said, the next thing I knew, I
was no longer inside the cabin. I was outside, in
the open air. I hadn't left the plane. The plane
had left me. Dear God, I refuse to imagine it.
(11:48):
Kupka fell approximately ten thousand feet still in her seat belt,
connected to a bench with three seats. Julianne, likely the
only one in her row ring a seat belt, spiraled
down into the heart of the Amazon, totally alone. Miraculously,
some ten hours later, she surmised she awoke alive on
(12:10):
the jungle floor, where she assessed her injuries. She had
a damaged eye due to the sudden change in air pressure,
it had burst the capillaries in her eye. Besides her eye,
she was suffering from a broken collarbone, a deep cut
to her arm, and a severe concussion. And I should
mention that she also needed eyeglasses, and she could not
find her eyeglasses. So she's out there pretty much blind, injured,
(12:34):
with one shoe in a mini dress in the rainforest,
and she's seventeen. Not that that makes her any less capable,
but good god, you know, if I think of myself
at age seventeen being in this situation again, I would
just lay down, be like, Okay, go ahead, absorb me
into the ground, take me back. She said. She spent
(12:54):
the rest of the day dropping in and out of consciousness,
too injured and weak to remove herself from the seat
that she was still strapped to, and again her mother
wasn't next to her, but I'm sure at that point
she couldn't form much of a coherent thought, she said.
She lay there almost like an embryo for the rest
of the day, and a whole night until the next morning,
(13:14):
when she eventually regained her strength. Her first priority was
to locate her mother, but without her glasses, Julianne found
it difficult to orient herself. And you know, it was
her first priority. She just really couldn't get a handle
on it. But her mother, Maria, a passionate animal lover
and you know scientist, had bestowed upon her child a
(13:36):
gift that would help save her. She could identify the
croaks of frogs and the calls of birds around her,
and she said, she immediately recognized the sounds of wildlife
from Panguana and realized that she was in the same jungle,
and I'm like shit, that is lucky. She was not
far from home, but one wrong turn and she could
(13:57):
walk deeper and deeper into the world's large rainforest. She
said there was almost nothing that her parents hadn't taught
her about the jungle, and that she only had to
find that knowledge in her concussion fogged head. Julianne finally
did pry herself from her plane seat and stumbled blindly forward.
She found a packet of lollipops that must have fallen
(14:19):
from the plane, and she walked along a river just
as her parents had always taught her. Her father had
warned her that piranhas were only dangerous in shallow water,
so she kind of like conserved her energy and began
to float midstream, hoping that eventually she would encounter other
human beings. The jungle was in the midst of its
(14:40):
wet season, so it just rained on her relentlessly. Everything
was like just slightly too damp for her to start
a fire, and no trees bore fruit, so there was
really nothing for her to eat, and she said that
much of what grows in the jungle is poisonous, so
she just kept her hands off anything that she didn't recognize.
And her parents weren't botanists, you know, they taught her
how to survive out there. They were zoologists. They knew
(15:02):
more about animals and you know, birds and things like
that and fish than you know, what you could eat
out in the jungle. I'm sure they taught her a
little about that, but again she said, if she didn't
recognize that, she did not touch it. The next eight
days were spent weekly clamoring through the jungle with just
you know, some sweets that she had recovered from the
wreckage as sustenance. On her fourth day of trudging through
(15:26):
the Amazon, the call of king vultures struck fear in Julianne.
The scavengers she knew, only circled in great numbers when
something had died, and the call of those birds led
Julianne to a ghoulish scene. She found three passengers still
strapped to their row of seats, and they had hit
(15:48):
the ground with such force that they were half buried
in the earth, just like sticking out. And I know
that this was just you know, hope, you know, and
checking for her mother. There were three people in that row.
There were only three seats in the row. She and
her mother had been sitting in a row, so this
most likely could not have been her mother. But she
(16:08):
checked anyway because one of the passengers was a woman,
and she went to look at her toes, which probably
sounds strange, but she said that her mother never polished
her finger or toenails, and so she took a deep
breath because she knew that was not her mother. Julianne
could hear the rescue planes above searching for her, but
you know, the forests that canopy kept her hidden. She
(16:30):
was sunburned starving and weak, and by the tenth day
of her trek she was ready to give up. Ice
cold drops pelt me, soaking my thin summer dress. The
wind makes me shiver to the core. On those bleak nights,
as I cower under a tree or in a bush,
I feel utterly abandoned, she wrote. But around a bend
(16:51):
in the river she saw her salvation, a small hut
with a palm leaf roof. Inside she found a can
of gasoline and the gash in her shoulder. This is
lucky that she found. It was just infested with maggots. Yeah,
I know, it's not a pretty picture. So she poured
the gas over the wound, just as her father had
(17:13):
done for a family dog. She said the pain was
intense as the maggots tried to burrow further into the wound.
Good Lord, and she managed to pull out about thirty
maggots and was very proud of herself. I would be
too again. I'd just say take me, take me, maggots.
I'll become one of you. I'll assimilate well, I'll live together.
I'll become gigantic botfly. And she decided to go ahead
(17:35):
and spend the night in that hut, which is a
really good call. Just amazing that she was able to
find it. The next day, she awoke to the sound
of men's voices and rushed from the hut. The local
Peruvian fishermen, though they were terrified by the sight of
the skinny, dirty blonde girl. Remember she is a white,
(17:56):
blonde girl out in the middle of this. They thought
she was a kind of water apparently, a mythological figure
from local legend who is a hybrid of a water
dolphin and a blonde, white skinned woman. And I'm like,
what are the freaking odds. These guys were probably so
freaked out. I'd have been like, worship me, take me
back to civilization immediately. I would like to be worshiped
(18:18):
as a deity. But Julianne's parents, they had given her
one final key to her survival. They taught her Spanish.
Thank God, so these guys don't think she's some sort
of dolphin scary white lady. God, she said, I'm a
girl who was in the lancea crash. Yeah, my name
(18:40):
is Julianne. The following day, after a seven hour boat ride,
she arrived at a small missionary facility, where she remained
for several days, receiving medical attention and food, and finally
she was able to take a flight. I cannot believe
she got on another plane to her original destination of
Pucalpa to finally meet with her father. After recovering from
(19:03):
her own injuries, Julianne assisted search parties in locating the
crash site and recovering the victim's bodies. Her mother's body
was discovered on January twelfth, nineteen seventy two. Kupka returned
to her parents native West Germany, which you know, that's
what it was at the time they were separated, where
she fully recovered from her injuries. Like her parents. She
(19:25):
studied biology at the University of Kiel and graduated in
nineteen eighty. She received a doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy.
You know, mammals things that feed their babies with their
breasts and have wounds and give birth vaginally. If you
(19:46):
needed to know what that was, I just felt like
saying all of it. Congratulations, Tessa, Hey Jesus. She published
her thesis, Ecological Study of a Bat colony in the
Tropical Rainforest of Peru in eighteen eighty seven. This woman
is better than me and literally every way. Not only
did she get back on a plane like immediately after
(20:07):
surviving a plane crash, but she went back to the
site of her tragedy. But she also indeed did grow
up there, so I kind of get it. In nineteen
eighty nine, Kupka married Eric Diller, a German entomologist who
specializes in parasitic wasps? Does he specialize on how to
get rid of him? In two thousand, following the death
(20:28):
of her father, he lived that much longer, she took
over as the director of Penguana. She currently serves as
a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.
Cupka's or autobiography When I Fell from the Sky How
the Jungle Gave Me My Life Back, was released in
twenty eleven. The book won that year's Corn Literature Prize,
(20:52):
which I had not heard of before. In twenty nineteen,
the government of Peru made her a Grand Officer of
the Order of Merit for distinguish services. Not only did
she survive a plane crash, but she took authorities to
the side of the plane crash and aided in their
search for survivors. Of all ninety two passengers and crew,
(21:12):
Julianne was the sole survivor. This is extremely sad. It
was later discovered that fourteen of her fellow passengers, her
mother included, had survived the fall, but they had perished
in the following days awaiting rescue. And it's not like
they all crashed in one place. The plane broke apart,
the seats flew out of it and scattered all over
(21:34):
the place. I don't know if she would have been
able to find her mother in the condition that she
was in, And I think that's why she carried on
the way that she did, you know, just going down
the river, trying to get back to civilization, because she's like,
what am I even going to do if I find
my mom out there? Like I'm going to succumb to
these wounds eventually, Like they weren't serious enough to die
from immediately, but you know, the infection that she would
(21:55):
have most certainly gotten probably would have caused her to
go into se and die, and then who's she helping?
So I think she realized that the best she could
do was to get to civilization and get help and
hopefully someone had survived, and they had, but it was
just you know, too long they succumbed from their injuries.
(22:15):
Fourteen people survived, though, and just laid out there, which
is incredibly sad. The remains of the plane can still
be found the original crash site, but thankfully the bodies
of all the passengers have been recovered thanks to Julianne's help,
and they were laid to rest in a cemetery in
yarn A, Coca. I'm sorry, I know I'm missing it.
(22:37):
So how and why did Julianne survive? I don't know,
I mean really, I can only think that her wilderness
training and familiarity you know, about the area and what
she was in helped save her life. But how did
she physically survive that crash? And I guess it might
not have been that strange because fourteen other people did
as well and eventually died just from lack of medical treatment.
(23:01):
Over the years, Julianne herself has struggled to understand how
she came to be the only survivor of Lance Flight
five oh eight. All of the other people, including her
mother Maria, died in the crash, and again it is
believed that those fourteen people survived the impact, but just
weren't well enough to know trek out of the jungle
like Julianne had. The cause of the crash was officially
(23:23):
listed as an intentional decision by the airline to send
the plane into hazardous weather conditions. So yikes. Julianne later
learned this is horrendous that the aircraft was made entirely
from spare parts of other planes. Good God, like, it's willful, willful,
(23:45):
good Lord. I can't say enough about it. With her survival, though,
Julianne joined a small club. Dozens of people have fallen
from planes and walked away relatively unscathed. I'm going to
touch on a couple of them and then get to
the most recent one. A twenty three year old Serbian
flight attendant, Vesna Vulovi, survived the world's longest known fall
(24:06):
from a plane without a parachute. Just one year after Julianne.
A mid air explosion in nineteen seventy two saw Besna
plummet nine kilome snow in Czechoslovakia. She suffered a skull fracture,
two broken legs, and broken back. And I've got to
say again, really, not that bad. It is bad, Like
(24:26):
do I want those injuries? Absolutely not. But if I
sustain them falling out of a plane and I lived,
I would be cool with it. Just this year, in fact,
in June, shortly after news broke that an Air India
flight had crashed into the city of am Oh. Lord, uh,
let's see Ahmedabad, Ahmedabod. There we go. I got it,
am medapod. I'm sorry. I do look these up and
(24:48):
then I forget how to say them. I even like
write it out phonetically, and then I just blow it.
The video started circulating on social media showing a man
walking from the scene in a bloodstained shirt. Then it
emerged that that man was the lone survivor, a British
national of Indian origin identified as vishwash Kumar Ramesh. Thirty
(25:09):
seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and then
the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly, and that's
what he said while he was being treated at the
freaking hospital after surviving a plane crash. This is very
sad as well. He had been visiting family and was
returning to the UK with his brother who had been
sitting in a different row and he didn't know at
(25:31):
the time of his brother had survived. Are India later
confirmed that of the two hundred forty two people on
board the flight, two hundred and forty one had died,
making Ramesh the sole survivor. His cousin A. J. Valgi
told reporters and uh, I can't remember how to say that.
I think it's Leicester, England, that Ramesh had called his
(25:52):
family to tell them he's fine, adding that they were
upset about his brother and all of the others who died.
Of I mean, of course they are. Can you imagine
and that kind of survivor's guilt though like again, no way,
in no way, shape or form, was any of that
his fault. But living while your brother dies and two
hundred and other two hundred and forty other people beside
(26:12):
your brother, I cannot imagine truly. A doctor told CNN
that Ramesh's condition was not very critical and that he
could be released in the next couple days. They said,
he has some blood in the images, but he's not
very badly injured. He's very comfortable and under stripped observation
with no issues. And I mean again, he's totally fine.
(26:33):
Indian news outlets shared a photo of Ramesha's boarding pass
which indicates that he was in seat eleven A of
the flight, in the emergency exit row, just in front
of the plane's left wing, and she was also sitting.
Julianne was also sitting by the left wing of the plane,
albeit a totally different model of plane. Yeah, that's strange,
(26:55):
so Sienna and safety analyst and former US Federal Aviation
Administration safety inspector David Sushi, and that's how his name is,
said express surprise that someone seated at that part of
the plane would survive such a crash. He said that
the seat is right where the spar of the wing
would go under, and it would be a solid place
for the aircraft to hit the ground. But as far
(27:16):
as survivability above it, that is incredibly surprising, because that
was my first thought is, you know, it's got to
be like the positioning of the seat on the plane
or the row that you're sitting in, or YadA YadA.
I'm sure it's like one hundred different tiny little things,
you know, in some sort of final destination like scenario
that led to any of these people being able to
(27:37):
survive a plane crash with fairly minor injuries. Ramesh said
that he escaped through a small space near the door
by his seat. His hand was burned by the flames
as he fled from the aircraft. He said that he
didn't know how he managed to escape, and that he
also saw other passengers die in front of him, and
he said for some time that he thought he was
(27:58):
also going to die, but when he opened his eyes
realized he was alive, and he tried to unbuckle himself
from the seat and just escaped any way he could,
and he did so. When this plane crashed, people inside
the BJ Medical College and hospital Hostile were also killed.
The plane crashed into it, which is just wild. The
(28:21):
plane was headed for London's Gatwick Airport and was carrying Indian, British, Canadian,
and Portuguese nationals, so surviving what most would consider unsurvivable
is truly incredible. But how did they survive again? Was
it a particular seat that they were sat in, or
the section of the plane, or were the wind conditions
(28:43):
just right, or you know, did they were they relaxed
when they hit and didn't brace themselves. Julianne was one
of the only people that was buckled in her row,
so they believe that's how she survived. But you know
the rest of it, it's some sort of a miracle
that any of them lived. But still, you know, they're
all still here, and no one can quite explain why.
(29:05):
Julianne herself has several theories about how she made it
back in one piece. And I kind of like this,
She wonders, if perhaps the powerful updraft of the thunderstorm
slowed her descent, and if the thick canopy of leaves
beneath cushioned her landing. Now a biologist, she sees the
world just as her parents did. In her mind. Her
(29:26):
plane seat spun like the seed of a maple leaf,
which twirls like a tiny helicopter through the air with
remarkable grace. If you've never seen, we call them helicopters.
Like I know, I said tiny helicopter, but we call
them helicopters in Kentucky. It's like a little seed pod
on the end, like kind of a noble little seed pod.
It's got like a little tail, like a little wing,
(29:48):
one singular little thing, and when it falls from the tree,
it spins like that, like it's flat, and it just
like spins round and round, and lands gently on the ground.
She said, the forces of nature are usually too great
for any living thing to overcome, but sometimes, very rarely,
fate favors a tiny creature, an upward draft, a benevolent
(30:10):
canopy of leaves, and pure luck can conspire to deliver
someone safely back to Earth, like a maple seed. And
that girl in particular. Julianne grew up to be a scientist,
renowned for her study of bats. She still runs Panguana,
her family's legacy that stands proudly in the forest that
transformed her. She said, the jungle is as much a
(30:30):
part of me as my love for my husband, the
music of the people who live along the Amazon and
its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash,
and that is it. That is the wild, insane, uplifting,
really something we all need right now. Survival tale of
Julianne Cupka, the teenager who survived a plane crash in
(30:54):
the Amazon, And I think her theory about, you know,
her seat coming down, and I think maybe just the
way the seat fell she did kind of just spin, spin, spin.
She lost consciousness, so she doesn't know and also woke
up with a concussion. She may have some sort of
memory loss, I don't know, but that's she survived. She
(31:16):
woke up like you can you imagine, like try try
to imagine that, like just sitting on a plane. I
mean it was just on one sitting on a plane.
All of a sudden, white light, big noise. You can
feel the plane os diving and all of a sudden,
like plane just breaks apart, and you're like traveling as
though you're wonder woman in an invisible airplane. All you
(31:39):
see is the freaking seat. And when you wake up, shockingly,
you wake up, you see the canopy of the Amazon
rainforest above your head. Again, she wouldn't have been that
scared because she was from there, but most people would
have shit themselves right then and there and again just taken,
taken my strategy. Lay on the ground. Oh god, there's
(32:02):
a camera on, isn't there. We lay on the ground,
Let it just absorb you back in. I'd be like,
make it quick something, Come eat me, please, big snake,
go ahead and digest me. I'm cool. But oh she didn't.
She knew like practically everything about where she was at,
and she amazingly survived and then got on a fucking
(32:25):
plane to go see her father. I'm again better than me,
But like she probably thinks, well, what are the odds
is that's gonna happen to me again? That's the worst
thing that could possibly happen when I get on a plane.
Is it crashing? And it happened, so what are the
odds of it ever happening to me again? And I mean,
she's right, but I don't know. I would probably never
(32:47):
ever set there on a plane again. I would probably
become a reclose and again be like, this is has
to be like a final destination scenario. I know that
movie wasn't out back then, but I'd be like, this
is a final destination scenario. I was definitely supposed to die.
Death is coming for me. I will build a fortress.
I will outrun death. But I really wouldn't. I just
(33:08):
be like, a fuck it, take me, You're gonna take me,
take me anyway, Take me now. I'm sorry, I just
kicked my own chair. I think camera on is really
really weird. I can't see myself at least, but I'm
kind of horrified by what you can see because I
do indeed pull a lot of ices. I really it
(33:29):
would just be speculation, guessing, like how anyone survives some
sort of insane tragedy, like you know, a trained derailment,
a plane crash, you know, they walk away from a
car that's smashed in half or anything like that. It's
just really truly unbelievable because human bodies are so breaking fragile.
(33:53):
We are not like hearty in the slightest, like our
whole body are just freaking meat sacks held together by
a bunch of calcified bone. And we die easily, we
injure easily. I get a bruise, like from sitting still,
I probably have gotten eight bruises during this recording. I
do move around a lot though. Either way it you
(34:18):
can really only speculate how something like that happens. But
it is amazing. It is a feel good story, which is,
you know something in this genre of podcast, I feel
that I don't get to do enough. And while she
did endure something really horrible and she lost her mother,
she frames it as something that shaped her entire life,
(34:41):
and it indeed it did. She went on to you know,
continue running her family's legacy and probably living life for
her mother and everyone else that crashed on that plane
and she made sure that they were all found. She
made sure they were all found. Like I mean, they're
all like bonded forever, even though they're gone. They all
experienced one thing that nobody else has ever or will
(35:04):
ever experience. You know, on that particular flight, they all
died in the same place. She knew where they were,
She took them back, and she probably feels that she
owes them like some sort of a life debt. And
I just hope that she personally did not find her mother,
but there probably wasn't much left. You know. The rainforest
is extremely hot, which does speed up decomposition, and there
(35:25):
are lots and lots and lots of predators. So I
would hope that when her mother was recovered that she didn't,
you know, have to have to see anything that would
that would let her recognize her, because that would I
think that would change my experience if I if I
survived a plane crash and had to see that, I
just be like, well, I don't, I don't want to anymore.
I'm just gonna I'm gonna dig and dig myself into
(35:47):
a hole and live there forever. Either way. I'm seriously,
this is an incredible story. I'd heard it before. I
didn't know all the details. I was just like, holy crap,
just like a regular seventeen year old girl survived a
plane crash in the freaking Amazon. How'd she do that? Well,
she had a whole lot of training. And I not
trying to make this about me, but I say what,
(36:11):
I started recently studying herbs and flowers and whatnot, just
to see, like what is poisonous, what you can't eat?
Like you never freaking know. I did go to like
a survival camp when I was a kid for a
while in the Black Mountains in North Carolina, so I
know a little bit. But I'm just like, you never
freaking know when something like that could come in handy.
(36:31):
I'm well trained and you know, advanced life saving and
all that stuff, but like foraging and poisonous animals and plants,
I'm like, I need to know what these things are really,
mostly in my area because you know, that's where I'm at.
But if I were traveling, say, over top of the
(36:52):
freaking Amazon, I might look those things up too, and
just be like, just in case, like that saund's gonna happen,
but just in case, I'll be prepared, all right, Well,
If you enjoyed this episode, you can hear more on Fridays.
Episodes are really every Friday on all podcast hosting platforms. Yeah,
that's right. On social media, you can find me on
(37:13):
Instagram at Autumn Podcast, on threads at Autumn Podcast, Facebook
at autumns Audities, and Patreon at autumns Oddities. Any level
of paid subscription gets you ad free episodes, gets you
a little treasure trove of unreleased to the public episodes,
so you know, I know, I've downsized my format from
two episodes a week to one. If you miss me,
(37:35):
if you want to hear me more often, get on there.
There's some episodes that you can listen to. Oh God,
my computer is trying to die. Let's don't do that.
As always, I appreciate you listening, and remember, if it's
creepy and weird, you'll find it here. The tend
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