She did not know how long the walk would take. She did not know whether she would make it. She knew what to do.
## The Search Her Searchers Could Not See Her
Before following Juliane into the forest, it is worth pausing on the search that was happening above her.
In the days following the crash, Peruvian authorities and military units conducted aerial search operations over the crash area. Aircraft flew over the rainforest looking for survivors, for the wreckage, for any sign of what had happened to the ninety-two people aboard LANSA Flight 508.
The Amazon rainforest canopy is one of the most effective covers imaginable. A primary forest canopy in the lowland Amazon is dense enough, and layered enough, that a person walking beneath it is effectively invisible from the air. The tops of the trees — sometimes thirty or forty meters above the ground — form a largely continuous surface that blocks views of everything below.
Juliane Koepcke was walking under that canopy. The aircraft wreckage was scattered across a wide area under that canopy. The search aircraft could not see her. They could not see most of the wreckage, either, at least not from altitude.
This is not a failure of the search in any reproachable sense. It is a description of the physical reality of the Amazon rainforest and of aerial search limitations. Modern search-and-rescue has additional tools — thermal imaging, ground-penetrating radar, satellite technology — that were not available in 1971 and that would not necessarily solve the canopy problem in any case. In 1971, with the tools available, finding a person walking under the Amazon canopy was a matter of luck as much as methodology.