Vesna Vulović was a Serbian flight attendant who fell 10,160 meters (33,333 feet) from a crashing plane and, somehow, lived to tell the tale. It’s the longest fall without a parachute ever recorded, according to Guinness World Records, although parts of the story are still shrouded in mystery and intrigue.
The incident began on January 25, 1972 when JAT Flight 367 departed from Stockholm in Sweden. It was heading to Belgrade (now in Serbia, then Yugoslavia), but it had two stopovers along the way, in the Danish capital Copenhagen and another in Zagreb (now Croatia, then Yugoslavia).
After leaving Copenhagen Airport at 3:15 pm on the journey’s second leg, the aircraft was rocked by a powerful explosion at 4:01 pm as the plane passed over the village of Srbská Kamenice in Czechoslovakia, silencing the flight recorder and severing all communications in an instant.
An official report by the Czech Ministry of Transport later concluded that the blast originated from a brownish-red suitcase containing explosives and pyrotechnics, apparently triggered by an alarm clock mechanism.
Of the 28 people on board, 27 died – the sole survivor being Vesna Vulović, a 22-year-old crewmember.
She was rescued by Bruno Honke, a local man who served as a medic in World War Two, who had heard her faint cries amid the carnage and the crashing of the wreckage. He found Vulović trapped in the debris, her legs poking out of the torn aircraft body that lay twisted on a snowy hillside. She was barely alive, drenched in blood and drifting in and out of consciousness.
She spent the next three days in a coma with a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, two broken legs, and a broken pelvis. Her body was also temporarily paralyzed below the waist for just under a year. She was only able to walk after intensive rehabilitation, but still suffered from a minor limp for the rest of her life.
Nevertheless, against all odds, she had survived the fall.
“When I saw a newspaper and read what had happened, I nearly died from the shock,” Vulović told the New York Times in 2008.
“I am like a cat. I have had nine lives,” she commented.
In her later years, Vulović became something of a minor celebrity and a national heroine, but aside from the occasional media interview, she lived a secluded life with her cats in Belgrade and appeared to show signs of survivor’s guilt.
“Whenever I think of the accident, I have a prevailing, grave feeling of guilt for surviving it and I cry… Then I think maybe I should not have survived at all,” she told The Independent in 2012.
“I don’t know what to say when people say I was lucky… life is so hard today.”
She passed away on December 23, 2016 at the age of 66. The cause of death was not disclosed.
How did Vulović survive the crash?
It’s not totally clear how Vulović survived the crash, other than through sheer luck (if you can call it that). Guinness World Records attributes her survival to being pinned down by a food cart at the tail end of the plane.
The explosion would have caused the cabin to rapidly depressurize, sucking most of the passengers out of the aircraft, but Vulović managed to stay put. The wreckage also had a relatively fortunate landing, crashing into a heavily wooded area and a snowy hill, which could have helped to soften the fall.
The official story was that the bomb was planted by Croatian nationalists as a middle finger to the Yugoslav government. However, several years after the incident, two journalists threw doubt on this account.
Instead, they claimed that the Czechoslovakian air force accidentally shot down JAT Flight 367 using a MiG fighter jet after mistaking it for an enemy aircraft approaching a sensitive military area.
The journalists believe that the Communist authorities invented the bomb story as a way to cover up their blunder. If this telling of the story is true, they said, the plane would have fallen from a significantly lower altitude.
“The Czechoslovak secret police managed to spread this wild tale throughout the world,” Peter Hornung, an investigative journalist in Prague, said in 2009, according to the Guardian.
“No doubts have ever been expressed regarding the fall. The story was so good and so beautiful that no one thought to ask any questions.”
This interpretation has never been verified, but it would make Vulović’s unlikely survival more plausible – and arguably less miraculous.
Source Link: Vesna Vulović: The Woman Who Fell Over 10,000 Meters And Miraculously Survived