Five cases of miraculous survival in the world after plane crashes

After more than two weeks, a hundred soldiers and indigenous people continue to search for possible survivors of the plane crash in which an aircraft fell into the dense jungle of Guaviare, south of Colombia.

LOOK: Petro retracts his announcement about the rescue of 4 children lost in the jungle of Colombia 18 days ago

On Wednesday the 17th, President Gustavo Petro assured through his official Twitter account that they had “found alive the 4 children who had disappeared from the plane crash”.

However, the next day, the president had to delete his tweet and apologize because “the information provided by the ICBF (Colombian Institute for Family Welfare) could not be confirmed”.

The minors referred to are three children aged 13, 9 and 4; in addition to an 11-month-old baby, all of them belonging to the Huitoto community.

According to the Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), the Huitotos live in “harmony” with the hostile conditions of the Amazon and preserve traditions such as hunting, fishing and gathering wild fruits.

This tragedy, which keeps Colombia in suspense, brings to mind other shocking cases of people who managed to survive plane crashes.

The miracle of the Andes has been captured in the film ¡Viven! (1993) and several of the survivors have written books or give lectures narrating their experience.

On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 carrying the Old Christians Club amateur rugby team from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile crashed into the Andes region of Argentina due to co-pilot error.

The impact caused the death of 13 of the 45 passengers. During the first night, another four people died due to the cold and the injuries caused by the accident. An avalanche would cause eight more deaths and another four people died two weeks after the accident due to infections on their wounds.

The rescue efforts were suspended eight days after the accident, because the authorities considered that it was impossible for any eventual survivor to remain alive after that time.

The group, however, managed to overcome the low temperatures in the area, the lack of resources and had to resort to anthropophagy to avoid starving.

Two months after the accident, two of the survivors finally walked for days until they found a muleteer who was able to deliver the news.

In total, 16 people survived the tragedy and the two months that followed. The incredible nature of the case led to its being baptized as the miracle of the Andes.

Koepcke survived the crash of the plane in which she was traveling and was lost for ten days in the jungle of Pucallpa.

On December 24, 1971, LANSA Flight 508 left Lima for Pucallpa. Among the 92 people traveling inside -86 passengers and 6 crew members- was Juliane Koepcke, a young woman who had just graduated from high school.

Juliane was traveling with her mother, the renowned German ornithologist Maria Koepcke. The plan was to spend the Christmas holidays with her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, in Pucallpa.

Fate, however, had other plans.

At 12:36 in the afternoon, lightning struck one of the engines of the Lockheed L-188 in which they were flying, disintegrating a part of the ship and causing the passengers to be thrown into the air.

Juliane, strapped in by her seatbelt, was thrown off next to her seat. She fell onto the tops of the Amazonian trees. She was unconscious for three hours and when she woke up she was in the middle of the jungle.

A cut arm, a shoulder wound, a black eye, and a broken clavicle. Those were all the physical damages that the young woman suffered despite her spectacular accident. Around her, there were only charred remains of the ship and the corpses of other passengers.

For ten days, the young woman managed to avoid the innumerable dangers of the jungle until she met a group of hunters who helped her.

The indications of the young woman allowed to find the remains of the accident. It was determined that 13 people, those who traveled in the front part of the ship, had survived the incident but perished during the following days in the jungle.

Francesca Lewis at the time of the rescue in Panama.

The weekend before Christmas 2007, Francesca Lewis traveled to Panama with her best friend Talia and her father, the wealthy American businessman Michael Klein.

The plan was to spend a few days off at the Klein’s resort in that Central American country and return home to Santa Barbara, California, to celebrate the Christmas holidays.

When they were flying in the Kleins’ plane over the Panamanian province of Chiriquí, however, they suffered a fatal accident. The small plane in which they were traveling hit the Barú volcano, located 430 kilometers from the capital.

The crash caused the immediate death of Talia, Michael and the plane’s pilot, Edwin Lasso. Francesca, meanwhile, was left unconscious clinging to her seat.

The 12-year-old girl endured the inclement weather conditions for 72 hours, which could have frozen her, according to rescuers. Despite the initial rumors that Francesca would have walked through the jungle until she met the rescue teams, the truth was that the youngest she overcame the traumatic episode unconscious of her.

The girl suffered a fractured arm, muscle trauma, impaired kidney function, and showed signs of hypothermia at the time of rescue.

“She only remembers seeing the trees, then she entered a dream state, had two dreams and at the end of these she woke up seeing the rescuers,” explained Peter Lewis, Francesca’s uncle, days after the minor was evacuated and attended.

Bakari survived for 13 hours in the middle of the Indian Ocean without knowing how to swim.

On June 30, 2009, an Airbus A310 belonging to Yemenia Airways took off from Sana’a International Airport in Yemen, en route to the Comoros, in south-east Africa.

The ship, in which 153 people were traveling, was only 30 minutes from reaching its destination when the control tower lost contact with the crew. The plane mysteriously plunged into the Indian Ocean, killing all on board.

Or at least that was believed.

Minutes before the accident, the 12-year-old French girl Bahia Bakari was leaning out of the window next to her seat, hoping to see something in the middle of the night. Suddenly, everything began to spin, it was the plane falling.

The young woman, who could not swim, was thrown into the air before falling into the water. She didn’t feel anything. The eddies that formed in the depths of her tried to drag her, while the violent waves prevented her from coming out.

Bahia, however, managed to stay afloat. As if that were not enough, the current kept taking the girl away from her shores and she entered an area infested with sharks.

The limited capabilities of Comoros prevented them from deploying massive rescue efforts, so they had to wait for French and US aircraft to arrive in the area to search for survivors.

After 13 hours clinging to one of the remains of the fuselage that helped her stay afloat, Bahia managed to be seen by some local fishermen, who contacted one of the nearby rescue boats and managed to save the girl.

Already in the El Mararouf hospital, in Moroni, the capital of Comoros, Bahia recovered from the cuts she had on her face and the fractures she suffered in the shoulder girdle due to the accident. There she also found out, however, that her mother, with whom she was traveling, had perished in the accident.

Vulovic is the only person in history to have survived a 10,000 meter fall without a parachute.

On January 26, 1972, which will hardly be repeated. That night, a Yugoslav JAT Airways DC-9 had taken off from Stockholm bound for Belgrade.

Only 28 people were traveling inside, including 3 hostesses. One of them was Vesna Vulovic, who had been scheduled on that flight due to a name mistake with another partner.

The flight was going smoothly, the ship was at cruising speed at an altitude of about 10,000 meters when suddenly the tragedy took place.

A bomb located in the front of the ship exploded, causing an explosion that pulverized the front part and detached the back. In the latter was Vesna, who was also protected by one of the carts that had gotten stuck in front of her.

The piece of fuselage fell from 10,160 meters. Inside it, Vesna was unconscious. The wreckage of the plane crashed over the border between Germany and the now extinct Yugoslavia.

A villager who had participated in World War II as a doctor was near the area of ​​the tragedy and was able to witness the explosion. He immediately approached the scene and found Vesna seriously injured but alive.

He managed to keep her stable until the emergency services arrived and transferred the young woman to a nearby hospital. Vesna had fractures in her legs, head and three vertebrae -one of them ended up totally pulverized-, she also suffered a brain hemorrhage.

After 27 days in a coma, however, he woke up unable to remember anything. The woman was discharged and her case deserved a space in the Guinness Book of Records as she was the only person to survive a fall of 10,000 meters without a parachute.

Source: Elcomercio