Alive in the Andes: in 1972, an Uruguayan plane with 45 people on board crashed in the Andes mountains. More than a dozen people died in the impact, and eight were later killed by an avalanche that swept over their shelter in the wreckage. The last 16 survivors were rescued more than two months later: faced with starvation and radio news reports that the search for them had been abandoned, the survivors fed on the dead passengers who had been preserved in the snow. Rescuers only learned of the survivors after two of the passengers completed a 10-day trek across the mountains to find help.
Riding the thunder: Lt Col William Rankin is the only known person to survive a fall through a thundercloud. In 1959, the veteran fighter was flying an F-8 jet above a thunderstorm in North Carolina when his engine failed and the aircraft fell into the cloud. He ejected from the aircraft into the -50 degree air and suffered instant frostbite. After his parachute opened, he was tossed around inside the storm for more than 30 minutes, as huge bolts of lightning crashed nearby and he had to hold his breath to keep from drowning. Eventually he landed in a forest, and searched around the area until he found help.
The longest fall: A stewardess on a Yugoslav passenger jet, Vesna Vulovi, was the only person to survive a fall of 10,160 metres after the plane exploded in mid-air in 1972 – possibly as a result of a bomb. She was still inside the tail section of the aircraft when it hit a snow bank; she suffered a broken skull, legs, vertebrae, and was in a coma for 27 days. Vulovi holds the official record for the longest fall without a parachute. But it’s rumoured the aircraft may have been shot down accidentally by an anti-aircraft missile – and that the height of the fall was exaggerated to cover up the incident.
Sole survivor: On Christmas Eve, 1971, teenager Juliane Koepcke fell for more than 10,000 metres while still strapped to her seat, after the Peruvian passenger plane she was flying in was hit by lightning and disintegrated. It’s thought updrafts from the storm and the thick forest canopy helped break her fall. Juliane spent 11 days alone in the Peruvian jungle with a broken collarbone and half-blind without her glasses, before she was rescued. Her mother had also survived the crash, but was badly injured and died a few days later.
Going down? In 1945, more than a dozen people were killed when a straying B-25 bomber crashed into New York’s Empire State building. One of the survivors was elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver, who was injured when she was thrown out of her lift cage. When rescuers arrived, they put her back in the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. But the lift cables were damaged – and Betty fell uncontrolled in the elevator cage for 75 floors. Somehow she survived, and went back to work in the same elevator five months later.