Mother's Chilling Final Four Words To Her Daughter Moments Plane Plummets To The Ground

A mother spoke four chilling words just before the plane she and her daughter were on plummeted to the earth.

Juliane Diller’s mother had arranged for them to sit in the second-last row of Lansa flight 508, which was traveling from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru.

They were on their way to a festive reunion with Juliane’s father.

Juliane, who was seated by the window, witnessed a lightning bolt strike the plane’s right wing.

She recalls seeing a bright white glow surrounding the edges of the plane’s wing-mounted engines.

Suddenly, the aircraft lurched forward, dislodging her row of seats. It began a terrifying nosedive toward the ground.

Christmas Eve in 1971 should have been a time of joy for Juliane, filled with thoughts of Christmas gifts and the excitement of the holiday.

Juliane Diller was on a plane travelling with her mother when it split apart mid-air. She crashed into the jungle and had to survive 11 days. ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP via Getty Images

But instead, she remembers hearing her mother, Maria Koepcke, murmur, "now it’s all over," in an eerily calm tone, as if "it came from another world”.

Next, Juliane remembers seeing various shades of green beneath her.

At that moment, it became ‘crystal clear’ to her that she was plummeting from the sky.

According to the black box, the 86-passenger Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop airplane broke apart just 15 minutes before it was supposed to arrive in northeastern Peru, as reported by the Mirror.

Juliane ended up free-falling 3,000 meters into the rainforest below.

She later revealed that her mother had always been an anxious flyer.

She told The Guardian, "She always said for such a metal bird to be flying in the sky was unnatural."

For Maria, this observation wasn’t too far off. Both she and her husband, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, were passionate researchers in the fields of zoology, ornithology, and biology.

Birds of the natural world were Maria’s particular obsession. The couple worked at the Natural History Museum in Lima, and in 1968, they began a five-year field research project to study the fauna, flora, and food chains in a remote part of the rainforest.

They named their research outpost Panguana, after a local bird.

Juliane, who was 17 at the time, was initially supposed to fly back earlier.

But she asked her parents to postpone the trip so she could attend her school’s end-of-year prom.

Juliane has now become an award-winning conservationist, continuing her parents' work in the rainforest. 2021 Getty Images

During her time with her parents at the research outpost, she became familiar with the forest.

After the plane crash, Juliane recalls waking up about an hour later.

She was covered in mud and found herself under the same row of seats she had been sitting in during the flight.

The movement of the seats likely slowed her descent.

Now living in Puchheim, near Munich in Germany, Juliane survived the fall without any severe injuries.

She had a concussion, a broken collarbone, a torn cruciate ligament in her left knee, and a deep cut on her upper arm, which, surprisingly, was not bleeding.

However, her vision was a different story. She had lost her glasses.

One eye was swollen shut, and the other was reduced to a narrow slit.

She recalls that the first time she tried to stand up, she lost consciousness.

But the sounds around her were oddly familiar—the cicadas, frogs, and birds were all noises she had grown accustomed to.

Amazingly, Juliane had landed in a part of the rainforest that her parents had studied extensively.

Juliane survived 11 days in the jungle after the terrifying crash. juliane_koepcke/Instagram

She later said, "The chances of this happening were extremely low: the plane could have crashed over the sea, over the snow and ice of the Andes, or over the dense and treacherous montane forest to its east.

“All of those would probably have spelled certain death."

Despite the overwhelming odds, Juliane had a small glimmer of hope because of her knowledge of the rainforest.

Even though rainforests aren’t exactly teeming with edible food, and she suspected that the mushrooms she saw were toxic, she did find a bag of 30 boiled sweets.

She rationed herself to four sweets a day to survive the 11 days she spent in the jungle.

Though she could hear rescue planes overhead, she knew they wouldn’t be able to see her through the thick forest canopy.

Juliane says that even for someone with perfect vision, "every tree in the rainforest looks the same."

Eventually, she heard a dripping sound in the undergrowth and found a small stream of water seeping from the soil.

As a young girl, her father had taught her a crucial survival skill if she ever got lost in the jungle: "If you find moving water, then don't let it out of sight.

“The stream will take you to a brook, the brook will take you to a river, and there you will find civilization."

Even though she had only her prom dress and one shoe, Juliane was determined to survive.

With her vision impaired, she followed her father’s advice. She made her way through dense foliage, guided by the sounds of wildlife until she reached a riverbank.

Sadly, the sounds she heard were not those of civilization, but rather the calls of howler monkeys, the rustling of brocket deer, and the splashes of yacare caimans.

Juliane returned to the crash site while filming Wings of Hope in 1998. YouTube

By the seventh day after the crash, Juliane had run out of sweets and survived on the nutrients she found in river sediments.

On the eleventh day, as she rested on a sandy bank, she spotted a boat. At first, she thought her mind was playing tricks on her.

But the boat was real. It belonged to five men who had sought shelter from the heavy rainfall.

Their first impression of Juliane, who was in a disheveled state, was that she was some sort of ‘mythical hybrid creature’ that was ‘half river dolphin, half blond human’. This surreal encounter turned out to be her lifesaving moment.

However, her hopes of reuniting with her mother were shattered when the men informed her that the plane wreckage had not been found.

On January 12, Juliane’s mother, Maria, was discovered lifeless, leaving Juliane as the sole survivor of the horrific accident.

To escape the unwanted attention she received in Peru, Juliane decided to start a new life in Germany.

For years, she refused to do any interviews, and she avoided flying. She didn’t return to Peru for 14 years due to unrest in the region.

Juliane admitted that she spent a long time trying to forget the trauma of the plane crash. Being the only survivor made her question, "why me?"

In 1998, she revisited the crash site for the first time. This visit happened after she was contacted by filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had narrowly missed being on the same ill-fated flight.

Together, they made a film called Wings of Hope, which documented her experience in the forest.