She was 17-years-old on a Christmas Eve flight 40 years ago to join her father for Christmas when the unimaginable happened. The Lockheed L-188A Electra, on the way from Lima to Pu-callpa, flew directly into a thunderstorm. A strike of lightning left the plane incinerated and Juliane Diller (Koepcke[...]

On Christmas Eve 1971, the packed LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was struck by lightning and went down in dense jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. Of its 93 passengers, only one survived. Juliane Koepcke, the seventeen-year-old child of famous German zoologists. She'd been thrown fr[...]