The Sunday Read: ‘She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima, Peru. She was headed for Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, both zoologists. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, was struck by lightning and broke apart. Strapped to her seat, Juliane fell some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash. LANSA Flight 508 was the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history. In the 50 years since the crash, Juliane moved to Germany, earned a Ph.D. in biology, became an eminent zoologist, got married — and, after her father’s death, took over as director of Panguana and the primary organizer of expeditions to the refuge.

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0:25.6	An old family story.
0:36.0	My father was an inventor and an unapologetic punster.
0:40.7	One of his many patents was for an early multi-directional TV antenna.
0:45.7	He not only designed the antenna, but installed it atop the tower at the Empire State Building.
0:52.2	The building itself is 1,250 feet tall.
0:56.8	The tower climbs another 204 feet, the equivalent of about 17 stories.
1:03.6	Hereafter my dad scaled the tower, he started dating the woman who would become my mother.
1:09.8	He tried to impress her with tales of his daring do, one of which involved ascending to
1:14.8	the tip of the tower, Allah King Kong, and Augusti Wind.
1:19.6	What said, she said, what if you've been blown off?
1:23.5	My father, the story goes, smiled and cracked.
1:27.3	The funeral would have been terribly sad, but the reception would be fantastic.
1:35.5	My father in his own way was trying to encourage optimism in the face of misfortune, essentially
1:42.5	making chicken salad at a chicken whatever.
1:46.4	And so I was reminded of this yarn when my son-in-law forwarded an Instagram post about Yuleana
	...

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