i have seen a documentairy on discovery channel a long long time ago, featuring that story. If remeber correctly she wasn't the only survivar from the crash, but she was the only one that didn't stay at the crash scene ( she didn't knew that ). the others died there...

I think I first read this story in a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" article. And they said the same thing - quite a few people survived the crash, but everyone just sat around waiting to be rescued - none of them survived, in the end.

I suppose whether Koepcke did the "right" thing or not is probably undecidable; lots of people do the "right" thing and don't survive, lots do everything wrong and muddle through anyway. But she appears to have remained cool and made rational decisions, and in the end, she did survive.

A true survival story were the people invvolved seemed to do the right thing turned up in the papers a few weeks ago here in the UK. Can't remeber the exact details, but a couple of experienced mountaineers got caught in an unexpected (i.e. not forcast) storm on a planned climb and were stranded. After a day or so they sent a text message to a friend in London who managed to notify the rescue services of their exact location. After a couple of attempts they were brought down safely not much the worst for wear.

Will try to find the article and post a link....

Another "off the regular track" book I enjoyed was "Emergency!: Crisis in the Cockpit" by Stanley Stewart. None of it involved "survival" in the sense we discuss it but it was interesting to read about how professionals responded when all the chips were down.

Stewart's over-riding criterion when selecting these incidents was that they all be non-fatal incidents.

If you're interested in this kind of survival story, http://www.panix.com/~jac/aviation/UAL232-atc.html has transcripts of the actual conversation between United Airlines Flight 232 and Air Traffic Controllers, July 19, 1989. (This was the flight that crash-landed at Sioux City Gateway Airport after losing all three hydraulic lines in a freak accident.)

Thanks for the tip on the Stewart book.

Pretty eerie to read the transcript from UAL 232. Is that the one that they have video of? I think I've seen it on Discovery Wings.

It was a famous crash. The news media was on hand (I think) and they got complete footage of the crash. Astonishing to realise that almost 2/3 of the people on board survived.

The crash was used as the model for the plane crash in the Jeff Bridges movie "Fearless".