17 year-old Juliane Koepcke was sucked out of an airplane in 1971 after it was struck by a bolt of lightning. She fell 2 miles to the ground, strapped to her seat and survived after she endured 10 days in the Amazon Jungle

A teenager who fell 1.8 miles from a plane after watching her mum get sucked out of a window woke up in the jungle on Christmas Day - alone but alive. She was the sole survivor on LANSA Flight 508 from Peru’s capital Lima to the city of Pucallpa in the Amazonian rainforest.

Carrying 91 people, the aircraft began to break apart in mid-air as a fire took hold of one of its engines causing a wing to fall off.

“I see a blinding white light over the right wing. I don’t know whether it’s a flash of lightning or an explosion. I lose all sense of time. The airplane begins to nosedive. From my seat in the back, I can see down the aisle into the cockpit. My ears, my head, my whole body are filled with the deep roar of the plane. Over everything, I hear my mother say calmly, ‘Now it’s all over.'” Then he mom was sucked out of a hole in the plane... then she followed, still buckled into her seat.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s any sound more terrifying than that of a plane spiraling towards its own crash, but what Juliane heard next just might have been. Suddenly everything went silent as the screams of her fellow passengers faded into terrifying silence. A look around revealed to Juliane that she was still falling, but no longer on the plane. Apparently, her seat, which she was still strapped into by the way, had come loose and gotten sucked out into the air.

Below her, she could see the treetops of the Peruvian rainforest as she hurtled towards their depths, probably pretty sure that they’d be her final stop. Make no mistake, she wasn’t in great shape when she woke up, but the fact that she did is nothing short of a miracle.

When she finally started to regain consciousness, she had a broken collarbone, a deep gash in her leg, and a concussion. So dazed was she, in fact, that she pretty much just had to lay there for the rest of the day and night. When she was finally able to get up and move around a bit, she tried to recall everything about surviving the jungle that her parents ever taught her which, luckily, was a lot.

For 11 days, she searched for any sign of civilization with nothing to eat but a small bag of candy that she’d discovered in the wreckage. Ultimately, her saving grace came down to a small stream that turned into a river. She recalled that their father had always told her to follow a river downstream because that’s where the people tended to be. For over a week, she walked along its bank, swam, or just flat out floated down it.

After 10 days battling against the agonising heat and torrential rain of the jungle, Juliane came across a motorised boat in the river and a barrel of diesel - using the fuel to kill off maggots which ha hatched eggs and infected her wounds.

To make matters even more maddening, Juliane would often spy or hear planes or helicopters overhead that were searching for the crashed plane. Tragically, none of them could see her through the forest canopy.

Fortunately, she refused to give up hope and finally, one day came upon a small hut. As it turned out, it belonged to three missionaries who would get her to a hospital.

A heartbroken Juliane later learned her mother had survived the impact of the crash, but was too badly injured to move and died days later.

She later discovered that she was the only passenger that had survived the plane crash and went on to write an incredible memoir called When I Fell From the Sky. There was also a movie made about her incredible story of survival in 1998 called Wings of Hope.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/d2ybsd/17_yearold_juliane_koepcke_was_sucked_out_of_an/
https://www.history101.com/juliane-koepcke-girl-fell-sky/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/remarkable-survival-teen-who-fell-13577253