From a window seat in a back row, the teenager watched a bolt of lightning strike the plane\u2019s right wing. She remembers the aircraft nose-diving and her mother saying, evenly, \u201cNow it\u2019s all over.\u201d She remembers people weeping and screaming. And she remembers the thundering silence that followed. The aircraft had broken apart, separating her from everyone else onboard. \u201cThe next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,\u201d Dr. Diller said. \u201cI was outside, in the open air. I hadn\u2019t left the plane; the plane had left me.\u201d<\/p>\n
As she plunged, the three-seat bench into which she was belted spun like the winged seed of a maple tree toward the jungle canopy. \u201cFrom above, the treetops resembled heads of broccoli,\u201d Dr. Diller recalled. She then blacked out, only to regain consciousness \u2014 alone, under the bench, in a torn minidress \u2014 on Christmas morning. She had fallen 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.<\/p>\n
Miraculously, her injuries were relatively minor: a broken collarbone, a sprained knee and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit. Most unbearable among the discomforts was the disappearance of her eyeglasses \u2014 she was nearsighted \u2014 and one of her open-back sandals. \u201cI lay there, almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night, until the next morning,\u201d she wrote in her memoir, \u201cWhen I Fell From the Sky,\u201d published in Germany in 2011. \u201cI am completely soaked, covered with mud and dirt, for it must have been pouring rain for a day and a night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 1971, Juliane Diller fell 10,000 feet into the Amazonian forest: "The jungle is as much a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash.\u201d https:\/\/t.co\/TCzcQWe0WY<\/a><\/p>\n — NYT Science (@NYTScience) June 19, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n