Posted by On January 26, 1972 JAT Flight 367 exploded in mid-air over Czechoslovakia, probably because of a bomb. The only survivor of the 28 people on board was Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulović, 22, who fell 10,160 meters without a parachute, trapped in the fuselage. She still holds the Guinness record. She died in Belgrade in 2016.
What would you say if I told you it’s possible to survive a fall of more than 10,000 meters from a plane without a parachute?
You’d surely say I’m crazy, but Vesna Vulović did it. Vesna was a Serbian flight attendant, famous for surviving a fall of 10,160 meters (33,330 feet) without a parachute after the explosion of the plane she was working on. She still holds the Guinness record for the highest fall survived without a parachute.
Vesna Vulović falls 10,160 meters
Vesna was born in Belgrade on January 3, 1950. A big Beatles fan, after her first year of university she went to England to improve her English and, back home, decided to become a flight attendant after seeing a friend in uniform. In 1971 she joined JAT, the Yugoslav national airline.
Vesna wasn’t supposed to be on that plane, but according to her the airline confused her with another flight attendant who had the same name.
On January 26, 1972 Vesna, 22, was on board Flight 367, a DC-9 from Stockholm to Belgrade, with stopovers in Copenhagen and Zagreb. At 4:01 pm, shortly after leaving Copenhagen, an explosion tore through the baggage compartment and the plane broke apart over the village of Srbská Kamenice, in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. All 28 people on board died, except Vesna.
The flight attendant miraculously survived a fall of 10,160 meters. She was found by a villager, Bruno Honke, who heard her screaming among the wreckage. Honke had been a medic in World War II and managed to keep her alive until rescuers arrived.
Vesna suffered a fractured skull with a cerebral hemorrhage, two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, one of them completely crushed, a fractured pelvis and several broken ribs. The injuries left her temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
She was in a coma for days and never remembered anything about the crash: the last thing she remembered was greeting passengers as they boarded, the next was her parents’ faces in the hospital, about a month later. When a doctor showed her a newspaper headline about the crash, she fainted.
How did she survive?
Given Vesna’s memory loss and the lack of other witnesses, investigators could only make hypotheses.
According to experts, Vesna was pinned by a food trolley in a piece of the fuselage, which broke away from the rest of the plane and fell at an angle onto a wooded, snow-covered mountainside that cushioned the impact.
The other passengers were blown out of the aircraft when the cabin depressurized. Doctors think Vesna’s low blood pressure also helped, making her pass out quickly and keeping her heart from bursting on impact. She herself said that, knowing she had low blood pressure, she drank a huge amount of coffee before her flight attendant medical exam to pass it.
Recovery
Vesna stayed in hospital in Prague until March 12, 1972 and then returned to Belgrade. She was offered an injection to make her sleep during the flight, but refused: she wasn’t afraid of flying, because she remembered nothing. In the Belgrade hospital she was guarded day and night by police, for fear the bombers would want to kill her.
After several operations, within ten months she was walking again, although she limped for the rest of her life. She wanted to go back to being a flight attendant, but JAT preferred to give her a desk job, because her presence on flights would attract too much attention. In Yugoslavia she became a national heroine: she was honored by President Tito and even had a song dedicated to her.
In 1985 Guinness World Records officially recognized her as the record holder for the highest fall survived without a parachute. The award was presented to her in London by Paul McCartney, her idol.
Causes of the crash
The day after the crash a man anonymously called the Swedish newspaper Kvällsposten, saying he was a Croatian nationalist and claiming responsibility for the bombing. In those years exiled Croatian nationalists carried out many attacks against Yugoslavia, but no one was ever arrested. The Czechoslovak civil aviation authority attributed the explosion to a briefcase bomb.
As early as the 1990s, tabloids close to Milošević, against whom Vesna protested, claimed the plane had been shot down by a missile and that she had fallen from a much lower height.
In 2009 two Prague journalists, Peter Hornung and Pavel Theiner, claimed the plane had been mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by the Czechoslovak Air Force at only 800 meters, and that Vesna’s record was a cover-up by the secret police.
The Czech civil aviation authority dismissed this as a conspiracy theory, and Hornung himself admitted their evidence was only circumstantial. Vesna said that, remembering nothing, she could neither confirm nor deny it. Guinness still lists her as the record holder.
Her last years
In the early 1990s Vesna divorced and was pushed out of JAT for taking part in protests against Milošević. She kept fighting for democracy until his fall in 2000. In her last years she lived alone in Belgrade on a pension of about 300 euros a month, turning down almost all interviews, even from Oprah Winfrey and the BBC.
She said she felt guilty for surviving. “If you can survive what I survived”, she said, “you can survive anything.”
In December 2016 her friends became worried because she stopped answering the phone. On December 23 she was found dead in her apartment: she had suffered from heart problems for years. She was 66.
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