The Daily XX
[0] An old family story.
[1] My father was an inventor and an unapologetic punster.
[2] One of his many patents was for an early multidirectional TV antenna.
[3] He not only designed the antenna, but installed it atop the tower at the Empire State Building.
[4] The building itself is 1 ,250 feet tall.
[5] The tower climbs another 204 feet, the equivalent of about 17 stories.
[6] The year after my dad scaled the tower, he started dating the woman who would become my mother.
[7] He tried to impress her with tales of his daring do, one of which involved ascending to the tip of the tower, a la King Kong, in a gusty wind.
[8] But Sid, she said, what if you've been blown off?
[9] My father, the story goes, smiled and cracked.
[10] The funeral would have been terribly sad, but the reception would be fantastic.
[11] My father, in its own way, was trying to encourage optimism in the face of misfortune, essentially making chicken salad out of chicken whatever.
[12] And so I was reminded of this yarn when my son -in -law forwarded an Instagram post about Yuliana Diller, who 50 years ago was the sole survivor of the deadliest lightning strike disaster in aviation history.
[13] Today, she runs Penguana, a research scientist.
[14] founded by her parents in Peru, some 20 miles from the crash site.
[15] My name is Franz Lids, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.
[16] I wrote this story about Yuliana Diller's Fall and Rise.
[17] On the morning after Yuliana Diller fell to earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest, dazed with incomprehension.
[18] Just before noon, on the previous day, Christmas Eve, 1971, Yuliana, then 17, and her mother had boarded a flight in Lima, bound for Pukalpa, a rough -and -tumble port city along the Ukiyali River.
[19] Her final destination was Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived on and off with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans Wilhelm Kupka, both zoologists.
[20] The flight was supposed to last less than a hour.
[21] About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane, an 86 passenger Lockheed L -188A electric turboprop flew into a thunderstorm and began the shake.
[22] Overhead storage bins popped open, showering passengers and crew with luggage and Christmas presents.
[23] My mother, who was sitting beside me, said, hopefully this goes all right.
[24] We call Dr. Diller, who spoke by video from her home outside Munich, where she recently retired as deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology.
[25] Though I could sense her nervousness, I managed to stay calm.
[26] From a window seat in a back row, the teenager watched the bolt of lightning strike the plane's right wing.
[27] She remembers the aircraft nose diving, and her mother saying evenly, now it's all over.
[28] She remembers people weeping and screaming.
[29] And she remembers the thundering silence that followed.
[30] The aircraft had broken apart, separating her from everyone else on board.
[31] The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin, Dr. Diller said.
[32] I was outside in the open air.
[33] I hadn't left the plane.
[34] The plane had left me. As she plunged the three -seat bench into which she was belted, spun like the winged seed of a maple tree towards the jungle canopy.
[35] From above, the treetops resembled heads of broccoli, Dr. Diller recalled.
[36] Then she blacked out, only to regain consciousness, alone, under the bench, in a torn mini -dress, on Christmas morning.
[37] She had fallen some 10 ,000 feet, nearly two miles.
[38] Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact.
[39] Juliana was the sole survivor of the crash.
[40] 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 and the other narrowed to a slit.
[41] Most unbearable among the discomforts was the disappearance of her eyeglasses.
[42] She was nearsighted and one of her open -back sandals.
[43] I lay there almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night until the next morning she wrote in her memoir when I fell from the sky published in Germany in 2011 I am completely soaked covered with mud and dirt for it must have been pouring rain for a day and a night she listened to the calls of birds the croaks of frogs and the buzzing of insects I recognized the sounds of wildlife from Pangwana and realized I was in the same jungle and had survived the crash, Dr. Diller said.
[44] What I experienced was not fear, but a boundless feeling of abandonment.
[45] In shock, be fogged by a concussion and with only a small bag of candy to sustain her, she soldiered on through the fearsome Amazon.
[46] Eight -foot -speckled Caymans, poisonous snakes and spiders, stingless bees that clumped to her face, ever -present swarms of mosquitoes, riverbed stingrays that, when stepped on, instinctively lash out with their barbed venomous tails.
[47] It was the middle of the wet season, so there was no fruit within reach to pick and no dry kindling with which to make a fire.
[48] Riverwater provided what little nourishment Yuliana received.
[49] For 11 days, despite the staggering humidity and blast furnace heat, she walked and waited and swam.
[50] This year is the 50th anniversary of Lanzah Flight 508, the deadliest lightning strike disaster in aviation history.
[51] During the intervening years, Euliana moved to Germany, earned a Ph .D. in biology, and became an eminent zoologist.
[52] In 1989, she married Eric Diller, an entomologist and an authority on parasitic wasps.
[53] Despite an understandable unease about air travel, she has been continually drawn back to Panguana, the remote conservation outposts established by her parents in 1968.
[54] The jungle caught me and saved me, said Dr. Diller, who hasn't spoken publicly about the accident in many years.
[55] It was not its fault that I landed there.
[56] In 1981, she spent 18 months in residence at the station while researching her graduate thesis on diurnal butterflies and her doctoral dissertation on bats.
[57] 19 years later, after the death of her father, Dr. Diller took over as director of Pangwana and primary organizer of international expeditions to the refuge.
[58] On my lonely 11 -day hike back to civilization, I made myself a promise, Dr. Diller said.
[59] I vowed that if I stayed alive, I would devote my life to a meaningful cause that served nature and humanity.
[60] That cause would become Pangwana, the oldest biological research station in Peru.
[61] Starting in the 1970s, Dr. Diller and her father lobbied the government to protect the area from clearing, hunting, and colonization.
[62] Finally, in 2011, the newly minted Ministry of Environment declared Pinguana a private conservation area.
[63] To help acquire adjacent plots of land, Dr. Diller enlisted sponsors from abroad, largely through the largesse of Hope Fisteri, a bakery chain based in Munich, the property has expanded from its original of 445 acres to 4 ,000.
[64] Yuliana is an outstanding ambassador for how much private philanthropy can achieve, said Stefan Stolte, an executive board member of Stifter Verbrand, a German nonprofit that promotes education, science, innovation.
[65] Over the past half century, Panguana has been an engine of scientific discovery.
[66] To date, the flora and fauna have provided the fodder for 315 published papers on such exotic topics as the biology of the neotropical orchid genus Catacetum and the protrusile pheromone glands of the loring mantet.
[67] Clieved by the Yuya Peaches River, the preserve is home to more than 500 species of trees, 16 of them palms, 160 types of reptiles and amphibians, 100 different kinds of fish, seven varieties of monkey, and 380 bird species.
[68] Penguana's name comes from the local word for the undulated tinamu, the species of ground bird common to the Amazon basin.
[69] Dr. Diller's favorite childhood pet was a penguana, she named Pulserkin, or Little Pillow, because of its soft plumage.
[70] Panguana offers outstanding conditions for biodiversity researchers, serving both as a home base with excellent infrastructure and as a starting point into the primary rainforest just a few yards away, said Andrea Seeger, Deputy Director for the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology, Munich, Its extraordinary biodiversity is a Garden of Eden for scientists and a source of yielding successful research projects.
[71] Entomologists have cataloged a teeming array of insects on the ground and in the treetops of panguana, including butterflies, more than 600 species, orchard bees, 26 species, and moths, some 15 ,000.
[72] Man -fried Verhoog of the National National History Museum in Karlsruh, Germany, identified 520 species of ants, so much for picnics at Penguana.
[73] While working on her dissertation, Dr. Diller documented 52 species of bats at the reserve.
[74] We now know of 56, she said.
[75] By contrast, there are only 27 species in the entire continent of Europe.
[76] The preserve has been colonized by all three species of vampires.
[77] Although they seldom attacked humans, one dined on Dr. Diller's big toe.
[78] Vampire bats lap with their tongues rather than suck, she said.
[79] After they make a small incision with their teeth, protein in their saliva called dracolin acts as an anticoagulant, which keeps the blood flowing while they feed.
[80] Dr. Diller described her youth in Peru with enthusiasm and affection.
[81] She's born in Lima, where her parents worked at the National History Museum.
[82] Earthquakes were common.
[83] I grew up knowing that nothing is really safe, not even the solid ground I walked on.
[84] Dr. Diller said, The memories have helped me again and again to keep a cool head even in difficult situations.
[85] Dr. Diller said she was still haunted.
[86] by the mid -air separation from her mother.
[87] Her voice lowered when she recounted certain moments of the experience.
[88] Above all, of course, the moment when I had to accept that really only I had survived and that my mother had indeed died.
[89] Then there was a moment when I realized that I no longer heard any search planes and was convinced that I would surely die.
[90] And the feeling of dying without ever having done anything of significance in my young life, She achieved a reluctant fame from the air disaster, thanks to a cheesy Italian biopic in 1974, miracles still happen, in which the teenage Dr. Diller is portrayed as a hysterical dingbat.
[91] She avoided the news media for many years after and is still stung by the early reportage, which was sometimes wildly inaccurate.
[92] According to an accountant -life magazine in 1972, she made her get her get a little bit.
[93] away by building a raft of vines and branches.
[94] The German weekly, Sten, had her feasting on a cake she found in a wreckage and implied, from an interview conducted during her recovery, that she was arrogant and unfeeling.
[95] Victor Diller laid low until 1998 when she was approached by the movie director, Werner Herzog, who hoped to turn her survivor's story into a documentary for German TV.
[96] He had narrowly missed taking the same Christmas Eve flight while scouting locations for his historical drama, Aguirre, the wrath of God.
[97] He told her, for all I know, we may have bumped elbows in the airport.
[98] Intrigued, Dr. Diller traveled to Peru and was flown by helicopter to the crash site, where she recounted the harrowing details to Mr. Herzog amid the planes still scattered remains.
[99] The most gruesome moment in the film was her recollection of the fourth day in the jungle when she came upon a row of seats.
[100] Still strapped in were a woman and two men who had landed head first with such force that they were buried three feet into the ground, legs jutting grotesquely upward.
[101] It was horrifying, she told me. I didn't want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure that the woman wasn't my mother.
[102] I grabbed the stick and turned one of her feet carefully so I could see the toenails.
[103] They were polished and I took a deep breath.
[104] My mother never used polish on her nails.
[105] The result of Dr. Diller's collaboration with Mr. Herzog was Wings of Hope, an unsettling film that filtered through Mr. Herzog's gruff humanism, demonstrated the strange and terrible beauty of nature.
[106] Making the documentary was therapeutic, Dr. Diller said.
[107] At the time of the crash, no one offered me any formal counseling or psychological help.
[108] I had no idea that it was even possible to get help.
[109] Dr. Diller attributes her tenacity to her father, Hans Wilhelm Kupke, a single -minded ecologist.
[110] He met his wife, Maria von Mikulich Ridecksky, in 1947.
[111] at the University of Kiel, where both were biology students.
[112] Her Ph .D. thesis dealt with the coloration of wild and domestic doves, his wood lice.
[113] Late in 1948, Kupka was offered a job at the Natural History Museum in Lima.
[114] Getting there was not easy.
[115] Post -war travel in Europe was difficult enough, but particularly problematic for Germans.
[116] There were no passports, and visas were hard to.
[117] to come by.
[118] To reach Peru, Dr. Kupka had to first get to a port and inveigle his way onto a transatlantic freighter.
[119] Setting off on foot, he trekked over several mountain ranges, was arrested and served time in an Italian prison camp, and finally stowed away in the hold of a cargo ship bound for Uruguay by burrowing into a pile of rock salt.
[120] When he showed up at the office of the museum director, two years after accepting the job offer, he was told the position had already been filled.
[121] He persevered and wound up managing the museum's ichthyology collection.
[122] His fiancé followed him in a South Pacific steamer in 1950, and was hired at the museum too, eventually running the ornithology department.
[123] An expert on neotropical birds, she has since been memorialized in the scientific names of four Peruvian species.
[124] He is remembered for 1 ,684 -page two -volume opus life forms, the basis for a universally valid biological theory.
[125] In 1956, a species of lava lizard endemic to Peru, Microlophus Cupca Orum, was named in honor of the couple.
[126] In 1968, the Cupca has moved from Lima to an abandoned patch of primary forest in the middle of the jungle.
[127] Their plan was to conduct few field studies on its plants and animals for five years, exploring the rainforest without exploiting it.
[128] I wasn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of being there, Dr. Diller said.
[129] I was 14, and I didn't want to leave my schoolmates to sit in what I imagine would be the gloom under tall trees, whose canopy of leaves didn't permit even a glimmer of sunlight.
[130] To Yuliana's surprise, her new home wasn't dreary at all.
[131] It was gorgeous.
[132] an idol on the river with trees that bloom blazing red, she recalled in her memoir.
[133] They were a mango, guava, and citrus fruits, and over everything, a glorious 150 -foot -tall lapuna tree, also known as a kapok.
[134] The family lived in Penguana full -time with a German shepherd, Lobo, and a parakeet, Florian, in a wooden hut propped on stilts with a roof of palm thatch.
[135] Yuliana was homeschooled for two years, receiving her textbooks and homework by mail until the educational authorities demanded that she returned to Lima to finish high school.
[136] Dr. Diller's parents instilled in their only child not only a love of the Amazon wilderness, but the knowledge of the inner workings of its volatile ecosystem.
[137] If you ever get lost in the rainforest, they counseled, find moving water and follow its course to a river where human settlements are likely to be.
[138] Their advice proved prescient.
[139] In 1971, Yuliana, hiking away from the crash site, came upon a creek, which became a stream, which eventually became a river.
[140] On day 11 of her ordeal, she stumbled into the camp of a group of forest, workers.
[141] They fed her cassava and poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots that protruded like asparagus tips, she said.
[142] The next morning, the workers took her to her village from which she was flown to safety.
[143] For my parents, the rainforest station was a sanctuary, place of peace and harmony, isolated, and sublimely beautiful, Dr. Diller said, I feel the same way.
[144] The jungle was my real teacher, I learned to use old Indian trails as shortcuts and lay out a system of paths with a compass and folding ruler to orient myself in the thick bush.
[145] 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.
[146] Before 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic restricted international air travel, Dr. Diller made a point of visiting the Nature Preserve twice a year on month -long expeditions.
[147] Much of her administrative work involves keeping industrial and agricultural development at bay.
[148] She estimates that as much as 17 % of Amazonia has been deforested and laments that vanishing ice, fluctuating rain patterns and global warming, the average temperature at Pangwana has risen by 4 degrees Celsius in the past 30 years, or causing its wetlands to shrink.
[149] A recent study published in the journal Science Advances warned that the rainforest may be nearing a dangerous tipping point.
[150] After 20%, there is no possibility of recovery.
[151] Dr. Diller said grimly, you could expect a major forest dieback and a rather sudden evolution to something else, probably a degraded savannah.
[152] That would lead to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the preservation of the Peruvian rainforest is so urgent and necessary.
[153] Under Dr. Diller's stewardship, Penguana has increased its outreach to neighboring indigenous communities by providing jobs, bankrolling a new schoolhouse, and raising awareness about the short and long -term effects of human activity on the rainforest biodiversity and climate change.
[154] The key is getting the surrounding population to commit to preserving and protecting its environment, she said.
[155] Species and climate protection will only work if the locals are integrated into the projects, have a benefit for their already modest living conditions, and the cooperation is transparent.
[156] And so she plans to go back and continue returning once air travel allows.
[157] 50 years after Dr. Diller's traumatic journey through the jungle, she is pleased to look back on our life and know that it has achieved purpose and meaning.
[158] Just to have helped people and to have done something for nature means it was good that I was allowed to survive.
[159] She said with a flicker of a smile, and for that, I am so grateful.