The incredible true story of the woman who survived a horrific plane crash.

On Christmas Eve in 1971, a bolt of lightning struck LANSA Flight 508, while it was flying over the Amazonian jungle.

Juliane Koepcke, who was just 17 years old at the time, was sucked out of the plane. Still strapped to her seat, she plummeted over three kilometres to the ground.

Miraculously, she survived the fall. Koepcke was the sole survivor that day, with the other 91 passengers and crew on board perishing in the crash.

Koepcke described her experience of “free-falling” to Vice in 2012.

"I was in a tailspin," she said. "I saw the forest beneath me—like 'green cauliflower, like broccoli,' is how I described it later on. Then I lost consciousness and regained it only way later, the next day."

But Koepcke's ordeal didn't end there. When she woke up on the jungle floor almost 24 hours later, she realised that although she'd survived the crash - her mother, who she was travelling with, probably wasn't so lucky.

"I searched for a full day and then I realized there was no one there," she told Vice. "I crawled around all over the place and called out, but I couldn't hear anything."

Luckily, with her father being a world-renowned zoologist and her mother a ornithologist, Koepcke was familiar with the harsh conditions of the jungle.

He father had always told her if she got lost in the rain forest, she should find a stream and follow it, and that's exactly what she did.

"I try to follow the rivulet closely, but there are often tree trunks lying across it, or dense undergrowth blocks my way. Little by little, the rivulet grows wider and turns into a stream, which is partly dry, so that I can easily walk beside the water," she explained to Reader's Digest.

Koepcke followed that stream for 10 days straight, as it turned into a bigger stream, and then finally a river. During this time she came across stingrays, anacondas and alligator-like reptiles called caimans.

Remember when you were 16 and you thought you could do anything? Yeah, that. Post continues...

On the 10th day she stumbled upon a boat in the river and a few hours later she is finally rescued by a logging crew.

"At twilight I hear voices. I’m imagining them, I think. But the voices get closer. When three men come out of the forest and see me, they stop in shock," she told Reader's Digest.

"'I’m a girl who was in the LANSA crash,' I say in Spanish. 'My name is Juliane.'"

In 2011, Koepcke wrote a book about her amazing story of survival. She now works as a biologist and librarian at the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich.