The seat assembly to which she was attached consisted of her row of seats — several seats connected together — rather than a single seat. The larger surface area of a connected row of seats, spinning through the air in a configuration not unlike a maple seed’s autorotational descent, may have slowed her terminal velocity relative to what a single seat or a person in freefall would have experienced.
The thunderstorm that destroyed the aircraft may have had updrafts strong enough to slow the rate of descent, at least partially. The same storm that tore the aircraft apart may, in this hypothesis, have slowed the fall of one of its debris fields.
The Amazon rainforest canopy is not a flat surface. It is layered — the highest trees, the mid-canopy, the understory, the ground-level vegetation — in a way that would progressively dissipate the energy of a falling object passing through it, rather than the impact being absorbed by a single hard surface all at once. Thick canopy foliage acting as a series of partial brakes is plausible as a contributing factor.
No laboratory has reconstructed this specific event. No scientific paper has definitively established which factors were decisive. Werner Herzog, in discussing her survival for his 1998 documentary, said: “She did not leave the airplane, the airplane left her” — a formulation that captures the specific nature of what happened without claiming to explain it fully.
What can be said with confidence is that she survived the fall. She was alive when she reached the forest floor, though she would not know this for some hours, because she was unconscious.