Juliane Diller’s mother had booked herself and her daughter seats in the penultimate row of Lansa flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru, to reunite with her husband for the Christmas holidays. Diller was sitting next to the window, so when a bolt of lightning struck the plane’s right-hand wing, she had a clear view.
She describes seeing a gleaming white light around the outer of the two wing-mounted engines. When the plane lurched forward, her row of three seats dislocated from its mounting and she could see all the way down the aisles as it nosedived to the ground. It was 24 December 1971, and she could make out the shapes of Christmas presents and boxes with festive panettone cakes as they tumbled from the hand-luggage compartment. She heard her mother next to her say, “Now it’s all over” in an oddly calm voice, “as if it came from another world,” says Diller.
