Surviving Against All Odds: Incredible Tales of People Who Survived Fatal Plane Crashes – And the Amazing Man Who Lived Through it Twice

Experts in air travel have consistently reassured anxious travelers that flying in an airplane is the safest way to travel, emphasizing that individuals are at a much higher risk when driving a car compared to when they are on a plane.

Plane crashes are, thankfully, rare. However when disaster does strike and a plane is brought out of the sky, it results in catastrophic casualties. 

One recent tragic incident that highlights the dangers of air travel is the Jeju Air crash at Muan International Airport on December 29. The crash resulted in the loss of 179 out of 181 individuals on board Flight 2216 from Thailand to South Korea, as the plane collided with a concrete barrier during landing and burst into flames.

It comes just days after an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day, killing 38 people and leaving 29 injured.

Following the crash, rescue teams are diligently searching through the debris at the crash site in South Korea, while families are grieving the loss of their loved ones. Remarkably, two crew members managed to survive the impact and subsequent explosion, and are currently receiving medical treatment for their injuries.

They join an incredibly small group of people who are all bonded by one miraculous experience; surviving an aviation disaster that killed several other people. 

Around the world, ordinary human beings have somehow managed the extraordinary as they survived plummeting thousands of feet out of the sky in calamitous crashes – in a phenomenon the survivors themselves are unable to explain.

Here, FEMAIL recounts the miraculous stories of people who experienced the most terrifying aviation disasters and lived to tell the tale…

Austin Hatch

Austin Hatch’s survival story is perhaps more remarkable than any other – as he survived not one, but two plane crashes.

The 29-year-old, who grew up in the US state of Indiana, outlived his entire family after two disastrous collisions killed his mother, father, sister, brother and stepmother.

He was just eight years old when tragedy struck for the first time in his life during a small flight from North Michigan to his home state after visiting grandparents.

His father Stephen, a doctor and pilot, was flying the aircraft carrying Austin, his brother Ian, then five, and his sister Lindsay, then 11. Austin’s mother Julie, then 38, was also on board.

But as Stephen prepared to land the plane, it tragically plummeted out of the sky, killing Julie, Ian and Linsday immediately.

Miraculously, Stephen and Austin survived and escape d the wreckage with minor injuries. 

Speaking to the Mirror, Austin said: ‘The emotional pain was severe at losing my mum and siblings so young. I was blessed not to be physically injured too badly, but it was hard.’

As Austin and his father muddled through life in the wake of the tragedy that took their family from them, their bond grew ever stronger. Austin reached adolescence and dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player; something Stephen encouraged in him.

Meanwhile Stephen found love again with a woman named Kimberley a year after the crash. Kimberley had three children of her own; a son also named Austin, and two daughters named Britnee and Maria.

Despite the heartache of losing his mother and siblings in the crash when he was just a child, Austin revealed how he found another maternal figure in his stepmother as she too encouraged him to pursue his basketball dream.

And on 15 June 2011, Austin’s dream became a reality when he was offered a scholarship to play and study at the University of Michigan – his mother Julie’s alma mater.

But the joy was short lived as tragedy struck again in the Hatch family just nine days later on another family flight.

Austin, Stephen and Kim were involved in a second devastating plane crash; from which Austin was the only survivor.

However, despite making a miraculous recovery, Austin was left in critical condition with a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a fractured femur and a brain injury.

He was put into an induced coma to ease the swelling on his brain, but did not regain consciousness until six weeks after doctors first tried to bring him out of it.

When he finally regained consciousness, he had to learn how to walk and talk again while also dealing with the unimaginable pain of learning his father and stepmother had died – something he described as ‘the darkest time of my life’.

He recalled: ‘Even the waking up process took a few months. It was like the lights were on but nobody was home. I was there but I didn’t really understand what was going on and I couldn’t talk.’

Despite losing almost everything in the two crashes, Austin managed to graduate from high school and made it to the University of Michigan a year after his scholarship was first offered. 

There, he found love with his now-wife Abby, who played hockey while Austin played basketball – and the pair now share two children, a boy named Hudson and a girl named Marlie.

Austin’s early years may have been plagued by tragedy, but he now uses his remarkable story of survival to help others and has developed a GRIT programme which helps people overcome disaster in their personal lives and learn how to carry on after the worst has happened.

Juliane Koepcke

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Koepcke, then 17, survived LANSA Flight 508, which was travelling from Lima, Peru’s capital, to biological research centre Panguana.

After the plane was struck by lightning and disintegrated in the air, Juliane, still strapped into her seat, fell 3,000m into the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest. The disaster killed her mother, zoologist Maria Koepcke.

The night before the fateful flight, Juliane and her mother had attended the pupil’s high school graduation in the capital of Peru, Lima. Keen to get home for Christmas, they booked a flight on 24 December with troubled airline LANSA. 

The airline’s safety record was so poor that Hans-Wilhelm urged them to avoid the flight, but it was the only commercial plane with seats still available.

The survivor, who now lives in Germany and is a mammalogist specialising in bats, remained silent in the media for several years following her rescue, but began opening up about her story 15 years later when filmmaker Werner Herzog took her back to the Amazon Rainforest to retrace her steps in documentary Wings of Hope in 1998.

Writing about her memory of the flight in Reader’s Digest in 2013, Juliane recalled a fairly smooth first 30 minutes of the flight, during which passengers were served snacks.

However, following an uneventful beginning, passengers soon became frantic when the aircraft flew into a thunderstorm and could see lightning flashing all around them.

She recalled people screaming and crying around her as the plane was thrown around in the turbulence, with sandwich trays flying across the cabin.

Describing the moment the plane is thought to have been struck by lightning, Juliane recalled the plane going into a ‘nosedive’ as it fell out of the sky, with her mother saying: ‘Now it’s all over.’

As she fell through the air and towards the Amazon Rainforest, Juliane recalled losing consciousness before waking up again, still falling from the sky and upside-down. She described the vast forest beneath her as looking ‘like broccoli’ as she hurtled towards it.

On impact, she lost consciousness again before waking up the following day at 9am (her watch was still working). She had suffered deep cuts, a broken collarbone, an eye injury and a concussion. 

As she came around and realised what had happened, Juliane frantically searched for her mother, despite being incredibly weak from the fall. However, Maria’s body was nowhere near where Juliane had ended up.

For the next 11 days, Juliane survived alone in the Amazon Rainforest while she hoped to be rescued. Luckily, she had spent enough time in the forest as a child to have developed a strong knowledge of her dangerous surroundings.

As she searched for resources to keep her going while she tried to get to safety, she found a tiny spring which she drank from – however the water source also provided hope she could find her way out of the forest, and she continued to follow it for the next few days.

During her journey, Juliane resorted to drastic measures to stay alive.

In 2009 she told CNN the cut on her arm had become infested with maggots and she feared she would lose the limb.

‘I still wonder how so many maggots could have fitted into that little hole, it was no bigger than a one euro coin,’ she recalled. 

After stumbling across a tank of gasoline, she poured it onto the wound to disinfect it.

As she continued walking, Juliane also found bodies of other plane crash victims, many of whom were still strapped to their seats. 

‘I was horrified — I didn’t want to touch them but I wanted to make sure that my mother wasn’t one of them. So I took a stick and knocked a shoe off one of the bodies. The toe nails had nail polish on them and I knew it could not have been my mother because she never used nail polish,’ she recalled. 

When the stream eventually opened out into a river, Juliane was hopeful once more, but wrote of her anger and despair when she realised there wasn’t a single person in sight.

Desperate to get to safety, she swam through the treacherous waters, filled with reptiles, piranhas and stingrays, to try and find civilisation.

Her in-depth knowledge of the Amazon taught her that the predatory creatures were unlikely to be in the centre of the river, which is where she swam. However, under the beating sun, Juliane suffered intense second-degree burns which broke her skin.

With every day that passed, having consumed little more than a packet of sweets since the crash, she became weaker and weaker.

After 10 days of surviving alone, Juliane found a small boat which was docked by what looked like a human trail. She described using all her strength to climb to shore and follow the trail up an incline which took hours, to reach a small shack. Still there was no one in sight, so she spent the night there, hoping to be found by humans.

The following day, January 3, 1972, Juliane was finally discovered by three fishermen who found her in the shack and helped her to safety.

After her rescue, Juliane learnt that she was the sole remaining survivor of the LANSA crash. A total of 91 people had been killed, including Maria. 

She went on to help rescue teams locate the wreckage of the plane and the bodies of the victims, before relocating to her parents’ native country of Germany, where she made a full recovery.

In the immediate years following the crash, Juliane did not speak to the media about her ordeal. However, in 1998 filmmaker Werner Herzog made a film about her experience – a process in which she was involved.

Wings of Hope, a documentary about Juliane’s incredible survival story, saw the mammalogist travel back to the Amazon for the first time and revisit the crash site. 

As she flew with Herzog and her husband, Erich Diller, Juliane occupied the same seat on the flight, 19F, that she had sat in years before when LANSA flight 508 crashed.

She told the filmmaker how she has lost trust in pilots since the terrifying incident and ‘listen[s] out for every noise’ on planes now. 

Michelle Dussan

Michelle Dussan describes her life as ‘perfect’ until a fateful flight in December 1995 when she and her family were due to travel to Colombia for the first time – which would be then six-year-old Michelle’s first plane journey.

However the Dussans, from New Jersey, only barely made the American Airlines flight, after rushing to the airport in Miami amid chaos on the roads.  

Writing about her first ever flight in the Guardian, Michelle recalled how she bickered with her 13-year-old brother about who would take the window seat in the row; before he stormed off and went to sit elsewhere on the plane with their cousin.

Michelle’s memory of the catastrophe that killed almost her entire family in a total of 159 casualties ends at that argument, but her father Gonzalo remembers the chaos that ensued when the plane came into difficulty; as the aircraft shook violently, the lights went off and passengers began to scream.

The flight, which had been bound for the Colombian city of Calí, crashed into a mountain near Buga.

Michelle wrote: ‘When I woke up, I was really thirsty. I was screaming for help in Spanish and my dad was trying to get me out of the wreckage, but I was in a lot of pain and couldn’t move. 

‘I didn’t know it at the time, but I was buried underground from my waist down and had been stuck, with my seatbelt on, for 13 hours.’

She added she still has seatbelt marks on her legs from the crash, out of which only four people survived including Michelle and Gonzalo.

Eventually, the mountain rescue team found the survivors and Michelle was airlifted to hospital; but all she could think about during the journey was her mother, who had died in the crash.

She recalled asking for her mother several times, but Michelle’s family insisted she was simply ‘on a trip’ and would return.  

After receiving treatment in hospital, Michelle and her father Gonzalo went to her uncle’s house in Colombia to stay with the family while they worked through the shock and trauma of what happened to them.

Michelle recalled having therapy to cope with frequent nightmares, which caused her to wake up sweating and in tears as she slept next to her father.

She also revealed how the injury to her legs in the crash left her in a wheelchair for several years, during which time she could only walk with braces.

‘The doctors told my dad I would never walk again. The whole process of getting my nerves back in my legs was very painful. It’s definitely a miracle that I can walk again now,’ she said.

In the months after the crash, Michelle and Gonzalo moved back to New Jersey; but Michelle struggled to concentrate on her studies and now recalls how she frequently cried. She credits her faith with being able to overcome her trauma.

For years, both Michelle and Gonzalo were told that the plane crashed because of a pilot error. But in 2021 an ex pilot Tristan Loraine made a documentary called American 965, which explored the possibility there was a longstanding fault on the type of aircraft they flew on.

Both father and daughter have credited Tristan’s theory with bringing them ‘closure’ as they look to move on from the horrific trauma of the crash they survived.

Annette Herfkens

Annette Herfkens, a trader working for Santander in Madrid, didn’t want to board the flight from Ho Chi Minh City to the coast of Vietnam in November 1992. She was claustrophobic and the plane was tiny, carrying only 25 passengers.

But her fiancé Willem van der Pas encouraged her to take a leap of faith because it was only “a 20 minute flight” – a fib he told to calm her fears. 

However, 40 minutes into the flight, Van der Pas took his fiancée’s hand and admitted he didn’t like the movement the plane was experiencing as it dropped sharply.

That was the last thing Annette remembered before everything went black. When she woke up, she was in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle with the dead body of a fellow passenger on top of her. Van der Pas was a little further away, but he had died too.

Speaking to the Guardian about her ordeal, Annette, from the Netherlands but now living in New York, said she cannot recall how she escaped from the wreckage but explained her body had gone into ‘fight or flight’ mode – at which point she chose ‘flight’.

When she now speaks about her ordeal, Annette presumes her lack of memory is a form of ‘self protection’ after seeing her fiancé’s dead body and experiencing horrific injuries.

She had a collapsed lung, her jaw was hanging, and she had 12 broken bones in her hip and knee.

Annette recalled hearing other survivors crying out among the wreckage; but these noises slowly faded throughout her eight days in the Vietnamese jungle as they too passed away from their injuries.

Surprisingly, the images of the jungle that are imprinted in her mind are actually now a space of solace for Annette, who envisions the landscape when she meditates. 

She explained that, although it was the site of a catastrophic crash from which she was the only survivor, and it was also ridden with predators, she did not at any point think she would die in the jungle.

Annette recalls reaching a state of mindfulness (before it was named so) by focusing on her breathing as it dawned on her that her partner had died. 

‘I had never been so entirely alone. I panicked,’ she said, explaining that her collapsed lung made it difficult to breathe.

She was eventually rescued by authorities and taken to hospital in Vietnam. Annette remained in the east Asian nation for three months after the crash before flying back to Madrid where she resumed life as normal.

Years passed and Annette found love again, with her colleague Jamie Lupa. The couple moved to New York and had two sons; but despite embarking upon a new life, Annette’s remarkable survival story became the main topic of conversation at school gates and dinner parties.

She has since gone on to write a book about her story, Turbulence: A True Story of Survival, which documents how she beat the odds to become the only survivor of the horrific crash. It also tells how she used her coping and survival skills to cope with further adversity in her life; including her son Max’s autism diagnosis.

Her trauma can be triggered by small things like someone ordering Vietnamese food and now tries to sit in the front row on any flight she takes after being haunted by the body of a fellow passenger on top of her after the crash.

Annette still mourns for her late fiancé and says the grief is ‘an every day thing’ she has learnt to live with, and marks the anniversary of his death every year. 

Richard Laver

Richard Laver was just 12 years old when he boarded a Delta flight from Florida to California with his father on August 2, 1985. He was set to compete in a tennis tournament in LA and his father was accompanying him.

But when the plane was due to land in its first stop of Dallas-Fort Worth, it was caught in a huge storm. The aircraft crashed during its first attempt to land, killing 137 passengers including Richard’s father.

Describing himself as a ‘hyper aware’ child, Richard recounted to Business Insider how he had been nervous about the flight in the days leading up to his journey and thought something bad would happen.

When the plane hit the eye of the storm and he could see lightning out his window, he went to the toilet and splashed cold water on his face to calm himself down.

Richard’s instincts were proved right when the plane was hit significantly by a windshear as it landed, which propelled the aircraft into a water tower before it exploded in flames.

Richard suffered significant injuries in the crash including a lacerated stomach, second and third degree burns, a fractured neck and broken arms and kneecaps and a collapsed lung.

He was one of 26 survivors in the crash; but the consequences of the trauma stayed with him into his teenage years. 

Richard suffered from PTSD and questioned why he had survived when so many people, including his father, had died. He struggled to shower as the sound of the water reminded him of the rain in the storm.

By the age of 27, Richard found himself homeless and slept on a beach for a month. 

‘I’d swim hundreds of yards from the shore every day at sunset. I hoped that a shark would take me. I was scared of nothing — apart from having hope again,’ he recalled.

But Richard underwent a mindset shift when he realised nothing he endured in life would ever be as painful as the crash that killed his father.

He turned his life around and married his wife, Michelle; and the pair started a family. Their youngest daughter Katie has cerebral palsy and was severely underweight until the age of five when Richard invented a plant-based formula to give her the nourishment she needed. He then developed his idea into a business, Kate Farms, in 2012.

Later, his son Hunter bought him a bracelet which read ‘Lucky F***’ – which gave Richard the inspiration for his next business, an energy drinks company of the same name.