“It wasn’t that I had left the plane it was that the plane left me.”

November 27, 2022 6:40 PM

Wings of Hope

If you enjoy survival stories, zoologists, Peru, Peruvian matcheteros, plane crash stories, ragging on airlines, Werner Herzog, panguana, jungles, dugouts, Panguana, Maria Koepcke, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, Juliane Koepcke, crickets, mosquitoes, bats, poison arrow frogs, rescue, gratitude, stingrays, or wounds filled with maggots you’re going to appreciate this documentary.


[NYT link]
[archive link]
Previously

posted by bendy (2 comments total)

I recognized the name Juliane Koepcke. And while I enjoy poison arrow frogs, stingrays and maggot filled wounds as much as the next person, what really horrorifies me is the way she was treated by the press of the time.
posted by y2karl at 10:37 PM on November 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

When I was, at the start of the 1990s and for a very brief and not very shining moment, an ESL teacher, one of the books I used had a fill-in-the-blanks page telling this story. You were supposed to get your students to provide the nouns and verbs and prepositions, in a kind of serious "Mad Libs" exercise.

It was a terrible piece of pedagogy, as no one could ever wrap their heads around what had happened, this woman surviving a plane crash and walking out of the jungle, it made no sense at all, so they had no way of ever filling in the blanks. It just never, ever worked as a teachable thing.
posted by chavenet at 3:27 AM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]