How a cheap movie based on a true story helped a girl survive a plane crash

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The number of the lucky ones who became the only survivors of a plane crash does not even count hundreds, and most of these cases are associated with accidents at low altitudes. However, there are three women who survived a fall from 3, 5 and even 10 thousand meters. Interestingly, the story of one of them helped save the other.

Juliana Margaret Koepke (1971)

The Koepke family was originally from Germany. German émigrés found a new home in Peru, and it was there that tragedy struck in 1971. A biologist father who worked in Pucallpa was waiting for his wife and daughter for the Christmas holidays (Juliana's mother was an ornithologist). However, the plane taking off from Lima crashed somewhere over the jungle. Rescuers could not even find the wreckage and locate the crash site. However, after 9 days, local lumberjacks found Juliana Köpke in a forest hut. The 17-year-old girl not only survived the plane crash, but managed to survive in the jungle and go out to people, despite wounds and a broken collarbone.

According to Juliana's recollections, just 20 minutes before landing, the plane was inside a thunderstorm front. It began to shake, things fell, some passengers screamed. Then lightning struck, and the L-188 began to roll over. The girl firmly grabbed the chair, and, apparently, she was thrown out of the crumbling car along with the seat. The fall was probably softened by the crowns of the trees. Juliana woke up only a day later. Numerous bruises, fracture, eye damage and the fact that she lost her glasses did not break her will to live. Not finding other survivors, the girl decided to get out on her own.

Fortunately, Juliana turned out to be a master of survival in the jungle - together with her parents-scientists, she often went hiking and was not afraid of the forest. Among the wreckage, she managed to find a bag of sweets that allowed her not to die of hunger. The girl found a stream and headed downstream - it was easier to move along the shallow channel than through the jungle, and so it was more likely to go out to people. Fortunately, she did not meet dangerous predators, and after a few days of painful travel, the exhausted girl managed to find a lumberjack's hut on the bank of the stream.

Today Juliana Margaret Koepke retired from her career as a scientist (she followed in the footsteps of her parents) and works in a library. In 2011, she published her autobiography and has already announced the film adaptation of When I Fell From Heaven. However, the first film based on the facts of this amazing story was filmed back in 1974. The Italian-American drama "Miracles Still Happen" was created with a rather meager budget. The film made Julian herself smile - according to her, the heroine is quite awkward there and calls for help all the time, and the fight with the crocodile was clearly far-fetched. However, it was this film that helped another girl from the distant Soviet Union to survive in a plane crash.

Larisa Savitskaya (1981)

Larisa was only 20 years old, and she and her husband were returning from a honeymoon trip. An-24 made the flight from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. It was a happy coincidence that the plane was almost empty, and the newlyweds took their seats in the tail section. At an altitude of 5220 meters, a passenger plane collided with a long-range Tu-16K bomber. This terrible incident is today attributed to poor coordination between military and civilian controllers. The probability of such a collision "in the open sky" seems, of course, negligible, but a terrible catastrophe has occurred.

At the time of the collision, Larisa and her husband were sleeping peacefully. The girl woke up from a strong blow and a sudden cold (the temperature instantly dropped from 25 ° C to -30 ° C). Savitskaya later said that at that moment she remembered the film Miracles Still Happen, which she had watched shortly before the flight. The heroine there escaped from the crash, squeezing tightly into the chair, which then softened the fall. Larisa did the same and also miraculously survived. As in the crash in Peru, the gliding part of the collapsed plane fell on the trees (in this case, native birches took the blow).

Waking up a few hours later, Larisa saw in front of her a chair with her husband's body, out of 38 people on board Savitskaya alone survived. The girl waited for help for two days. Fortunately, the case was in August, so mosquitoes became the main problem for her. Having built a hut from the wreckage of the plane, Larisa held out until the rescuers arrived. She and her husband's body were found the last of all the passengers, because the disaster occurred at a high altitude and the wreckage was scattered over a huge area. When the doctors finally examined the girl, it turned out that she had a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, broken arm and ribs, but in general, for such a fall, this can be considered minor injuries.

In the Soviet Union, Larisa did not become a heroine at all, according to tradition, Soviet people were not frightened once again with stories of disasters, so it became known about a unique case only a few years later, and then the facts were greatly changed. Much later, Larisa was included in the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records, and twice: as a person who survived a fall from a maximum height and for a minimum amount of compensation for physical damage - 75 rubles. It was this amount that was determined by the State Insurance for the survivors of the plane crashes.

Vesna Vulovic (1972)

However, a stewardess from Yugoslavia can be considered the absolute record holder. Aircraft McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 exploded at an altitude of 10 160 meters. It happened during a flight between Copenhagen and Zagreb. The wreckage fell near the town of Ceska Kamenice in Czechoslovakia. The cause of the disaster was a terrorist act, and the Croatian National Movement claimed responsibility for the explosion.

Vesna Vulovic can hardly be called "lucky", since she should not have been on this flight at all. An error occurred and she was assigned to an extraordinary job to replace a flight attendant with a similar name. When the explosion occurred, the girl was in the passenger compartment - one of the passengers called her, so a reasonable explanation about the chair that fell on the trees does not fit in this case. Vesna does not remember how she managed to survive, since at the moment of the explosion she lost consciousness. She was simply found among the rubble. The stewardess was in a coma and received many injuries: fractures of the base of the skull, three vertebrae, both legs and pelvis. However, after a few years, she fully recovered and even returned to work. She was allowed to work only in the office of the airline, although Vesna really wanted to fly again - she, oddly enough, did not feel fear of flying, since she absolutely did not remember the disaster. But a girl named Vesna Nikolic, who was actually supposed to fly that day, quit the next day from the airline and never took off again.

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