Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories. Collins Maps
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carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back.
In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through.
The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air.
But they weren’t out of the woods yet.
They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this.
Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated.
It booted up first time.
Back to Earth with a splash
With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.
The enormous heat of re-entry ionized the air around the capsule causing a total communications blackout. For four and a half minutes the world held its breath. Were the men all right? Had the heat shield been damaged in the explosion? Was the craft now disintegrating in the upper atmosphere?
There must have been a few whoops of joy in Mission Control when the radio finally sparked back into life. Odyssey splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southeast of American Samoa and just 6.5 km (4 miles) from the recovery ship, USS Iwo Jima. The crew were generally in good shape. And they were home.
Two Miles Up without a Parachute
| A 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL WAS IN A PLANE OVER THE AMAZON RAINFOREST WHEN IT WAS HIT BY LIGHTNING AND DESTROYED. SHE FELL 3 KM (2 MILES) STILL STRAPPED TO A ROW OF SEATS AND AWOKE IN THE JUNGLE WITH MINOR INJURIES. THE ONLY SURVIVOR, SHE THEN TREKKED THROUGH THE JUNGLE FOR TEN DAYS TO REACH CIVILIZATION. |
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| DATE: 1971 SITUATION: PLANE CRASH CONDITION OF CONFINEMENT: SOLE SURVIVOR IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE DURATION OF CONFINEMENT: 10 DAYS MEANS OF ESCAPE: TREKKING THROUGH THE JUNGLE NO. OF ESCAPEES: 1 DANGERS: FALLING TO DEATH, DISEASE, STARVATION, DEHYDRATION EQUIPMENT: NONE |
Amazonian rainforest, Peru.
Home for Christmas
It was Christmas Eve in 1971 and more than anything in the world, 17-year-old Juliane Köpcke was looking forward to seeing her father.
She was travelling with her mother Maria, an ornithologist. The flight in the Lockheed Electra turboprop would take less than an hour. It would leave Lima and cross the huge wilderness of the Reserva Comunal El Sira before touching down in Pucallpa in the Amazonian rainforest where her parents ran a research station in the jungle studying wildlife.
The airline, LANSA, didn’t have the best safety reputation: it had recently lost two aircraft in crashes. The weather forecast was not good. But the family desperately wanted to be together for Christmas, so they stepped on board.
For the first twenty-five minutes everything was fine. Then the plane flew into heavy clouds and started shaking. Juliane’s mother was very nervous.
Falling to Earth
Suddenly there was a blinding flash on the starboard wing and a fraction of a second later, a sickening explosion. The plane instantly started plummeting straight down. Christmas presents were flying around the cabin and people were screaming: it was every air traveller’s worst nightmare.
‘To the right we saw a bright flash and the plane went into a nose dive. My mother said, “This is it!”’
Lightning had hit one of the fuel tanks. The explosion tore the right wing off.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. Juliane realized there was no plane around her any more. She was in the open air, flying, and far below her she could see the jungle. It was spinning. The plane had disintegrated, throwing passengers out into the storm, 3,000 m (10,000 ft) above the Amazon.
Then Juliane blacked out. She fell more than 3 km (2 miles) into the jungle canopy but miraculously survived with only minor injuries.
For the rest of that day and the night, she remained unconscious. She woke the next morning at nine o’clock (she remembers the exact time because she noticed that her watch was still working). As she sat up she realized she was still strapped into her row of seats. And she was completely alone in the jungle.
Her ordeal was just beginning.
Water of life
Rescue planes and search crews scanned the area soon after the plane lost contact with air traffic control. But the region was so vast and remote that they couldn’t find the crash site.
All ninety-one of the other passengers and crew on Flight 508 died. Remarkably, Juliane was relatively unhurt. The row of seats that she was strapped into spun as it fell, much like a helicopter, slowing her rate of descent. She also landed at a place where the jungle canopy had particularly thick foliage. This cushioned her impact with the ground. The only injuries she had were a broken collarbone, a swollen right eye, concussion and some gashes on her arms and legs.
Juliane was an intelligent, resourceful girl. She had also spent years on the research station with her parents. Her father was a practical man who had taught his daughter how to survive in the rainforest. With remarkable foresight he had prepared her for just such an emergency. He had told her that the first thing to do was find a creek and follow it downstream, because that would lead to a stream and the stream would flow into a bigger river where, eventually, there would be a human settlement.
She found a creek and started to wade downstream, but it was tough going.
Searching for her mother
As she travelled downstream, Juliane came across more wreckage – and more bodies. Her discoveries were gruesome. She came upon three women still strapped into their row of seats. They had landed headfirst and the impact had driven them nearly 0.5 m (2 ft) into the ground.
Juliane thought that one of the women might be her mother. Choking back her horror, she had to find out for certain. She couldn’t bring herself to try to pull the body from the ground, so she used a stick to prise one of its shoes off. The dead woman’s toes were painted with nail polish; as her mother never used nail polish, she knew it couldn’t be her.
She kept walking.
At the mercy of the jungle