Juliane Koepcke

Juliane Koepcke

Juliane Koepcke was born in Lima, Peru, in 1954 to German parents. As a teenager in 1971, she was the sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon rainforest. She is married to German zoologist and professor of mammalogy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

About Juliane Koepcke in brief

Summary Juliane KoepckeJuliane Koepcke was born in Lima, Peru, in 1954 to German parents who worked at the Museum of Natural History, Lima. As a teenager in 1971, she was the sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon rainforest. She survived a fall of 3,000 meters, still strapped to her seat. After recovering, she assisted search parties in locating the crash site and recovering the bodies of victims. Her mother’s body was discovered on 12 January 1972. She moved to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries, and returned to Peru to conduct research in mammalogy.

In 2019, she has been awarded the Order of Merit of Peru for her work on bat colonies in the tropical rain forest of Peru. Now known as Juliane Diller, she serves as librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. Her autobiography, When I Fell From the Sky, was released on 10 March 2011 by Piper Verlag, which received the Corine Prize for Literature in March 2011. She is married to German zoologist and professor of mammalogy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.