On Christmas Eve in 1971, LANSA Flight 508 is seven hours late over the Peruvian Amazon.
Passengers are rushing home.
Among them is 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke, flying with her mother.
Lightning hits the plane. It breaks apart in the air.
Juliane falls 9,843 feet (3,000 meters), still strapped to her seat row, and blacks out.
That is almost nine Eiffel Towers, stacked.
She wakes the next day under the canopy.
Her first thought: she has survived a plane crash.
She calls for her mother. Only the jungle answers.
A broken collarbone and deep cuts on her legs. Later she learns she tore a knee ligament, but she can walk.
The plane was 15 minutes from landing. The area has no people.
How does she get out?
She remembers a lesson from her mother, a bird scientist: do not push through the thick growth, but follow a stream to a river so she can drink and reach people.
For ten or eleven days she lives on sweets and stays clear of predators.
She finds a logging camp that almost no one visits, with a hut and a boat.
The workers save her.
She is the only survivor of the flight.
The fall from the sky does not kill her.
The jungle does not succeed either.
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