How A Woman Survived A 33,330 Feet Fall Out Of The Sky

Her Plane Exploded 33,000 Feet In The Air – And Somehow Vesna Vulović Survived The Fall

A young Vesna Vulović in her flight attendant uniform.

On the evening of January 26, 1972, Bruno Honke heard screaming coming from a hillside just outside of his village in Czechoslovakia. As he went to investigate, he came across a grisly sight: the wreckage of an airplane, torn apart by an explosion.

Though it seemed impossible that anyone could have survived such a crash, Honke soon realized that someone had. Amid the wreckage was a woman wearing a bloodstained turquoise flight attendant’s uniform and no shoes.

Her name was Vesna Vulović and though even she didn’t know it yet, she had just survived an epic fall of 33,330 feet in what is one of the strangest world records: surviving the highest fall without a parachute.

The same type of aircraft that Vesna Vulović was on before her fall.

The wreckage of the JAT Flight 367 crash.

Serbian-born Vesna Vulović was 22 years old and had been a flight attendant for only eight months before the fateful crash. After traveling to London to learn English, she realized her love of traveling. When she found out a friend was becoming a flight attendant and traveling the world, she jumped at the chance.

In 1971 she joined JAT Airways, Yugoslavia’s national flag carrier and the country’s largest airline. However, her dream almost didn’t come true. With a history of low blood pressure, Vulović knew it was unlikely she’d pass the medical exam. So right before heading in, she drank several cups of coffee, hoping it would keep her blood pressure high enough.

To her delight, it worked, and she was allowed into the flight attendant training program.

Eight months into her flight attendant career, Vesna Vulović was told to join the crew of JAT Flight 367, flying from Stockholm to Belgrade with a stopover in Copenhagen. Though she realized that JAT had confused her with another attendant named Vesna, she agreed to join anyway. Having never been to Denmark, Vulović considered it yet another opportunity to travel.

When she arrived, however, she found a downtrodden crew. While Vulović had been hoping to go sightseeing, the rest of the group seemed focused on shopping and sitting in the hotel. The captain, Vulović would later recall, spent 24 hours locked in his room, refusing to go out at all.

At 1:30 PM on January 26, 1972, the crew met Flight 367 at the Copenhagen Airport and watched as the passengers and previous crew deplaned. The new passengers boarded and the flight eventually took off at 3:15 p.m.

Just 46 minutes into the fight, disaster struck.

At 4:01 p.m., there was an explosion in the baggage compartment. The aircraft broke apart in mid-air before falling 33,330 feet down to the ground in Srbská Kamenice, Czechoslovakia. Of the 28 passengers and crew, Vesna Vulović was the only survivor.

Fortunately, Bruno Honke, the villager who discovered her, had been a medic during World War II and was able to keep her alive until rescuers arrived. But it was no easy feat. From the crash, Vulović had sustained two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, a fractured pelvis, broken ribs, and a fractured skull.

After being taken to a hospital in Prague, Vesna Vulović spent several days in a coma recovering.

In addition to her extensive bodily injuries and her fractured skull, her brain had also hemorrhaged and she had total amnesia. From the hour preceding the crash until almost a month afterward, Vulović had no idea what had happened. She remembered greeting passengers for the flight, and then nothing until she saw her parents in her hospital room.

How Vesna Vulović Survived

Though her injuries could have left her permanently paralyzed or even dead, within 10 months of her fall Vesna Vulović was walking again. Doctors had never expected her to live that long, and indeed from the moment she awoke, she surprised them all.

The first thing she did upon waking was ask for a cigarette. Her recovery period was actually relatively short and incredibly successful – a fact she attributes to “a childhood diet that included chocolate, spinach, and fish oil.”

Air safety investigators believe that Vulović’s position within the aircraft at the time of the explosion helped her survive the fall. She was in the rear of the plane with a food cart when the fuselage broke apart.

While many other passengers were sucked out of the plane after the explosion, Vulović became pinned by the cart. The small section she was in fell to the ground on a heavily wooded, snow-covered hillside.

Vulović’s doctors concurred with the air investigators and added their own conclusions. They claimed that the very thing that almost kept Vulović from being a flight attendant is what ultimately saved her life. 

Her physicians believe her low blood pressure kept her heart from bursting on impact with the mountainside.

The explosion was determined to be from a briefcase bomb planted by the Ustaše – a Croatian separatist group seeking independence from Yugoslavia. 

In response to the attack, airport security measures were tightened in the country.

Due to her amnesia, Vesna Vulović had no memory of the crash or the explosion and was left with the same love of flying and sense of adventure she had beforehand. She remained an avid flyer and died in 2016 at the age of 66.

Later life

In September 1972, Vulović expressed willingness to resume working as a flight attendant. The airline felt that her presence on flights would attract too much publicity and instead gave her a desk job negotiating freight contracts. 

In Yugoslavia, Vulović was celebrated as a national hero. 

Her reputation as a "Cold War heroine" also extended to the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. 

After the crash, Vulović received a decoration from the President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, and the Serbian folk singer Miroslav Ilić recorded a song titled Vesna stjuardesa ("Vesna the Stewardess"). 

She was soon made an honorary citizen of Srbská Kamenice. Honke's granddaughter, born six weeks after Vulović's fall, was named Vesna in her honour. Vulović continued to fly regularly, stating that other passengers were surprised to see her on flights and wanted to sit next to her.

Vulović's parents both died within a few years of her fall. In 1977, she married mechanical engineer Nikola Breka after a year of dating. Although Vulović was advised by physicians that her injuries would not have an adverse effect on her reproductive function, she experienced an ectopic pregnancy that nearly proved fatal and was never able to have children. 

In 1985, The Guinness Book of World Records recognized her as the world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,330 ft). She received the recognition at a London gala from musician Paul McCartney. 

Vulović was thus officially acknowledged as having surpassed the records of other fall survivors, such as Alan Magee, Nicholas Alkemade, and Ivan Chisov.

In the early 1990s, Vulović and her husband divorced. Vulović attributed the divorce to her chain smoking, which her husband disapproved of. 

Around the same time, Vulović was fired from JAT for speaking out against Serbian statesman Slobodan Milošević and taking part in anti-government protests. She avoided arrest because the government was concerned about the negative publicity that her imprisonment would bring. 

In response to her activism, pro-Milošević tabloids launched a smear campaign against her, claiming that Flight 367 had been shot down by a Czechoslovak surface-to-air missile and that she had fallen from a lesser height than previously believed. 

Vulović continued taking part in anti-government demonstrations throughout the 1990s. When Milošević and his Socialist Party of Serbia were ousted in the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000, Vulović was among several celebrities who took to the balcony of Belgrade's city hall to make victory addresses. 

She later campaigned on behalf of the Democratic Party of Serbia and advocated for Serbia's entry into the European Union, which she believed would bring economic prosperity.

   

Vesna Vulović recovering in the hospital.

Deteriorating health and death

Vulović told reporters that she did not think of her fall every day, but admitted to struggling with 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." 

Vulović declined therapy to help cope with her experiences and instead turned to religion, becoming a devout Orthodox Christian. She stated that her ordeal had turned her into an optimist. "If you can survive what I survived," she said, "you can survive anything."

In 2005, Vulović's fall was recreated by the American television program MythBusters. 

Four years later, Peter Hornung-Andersen and Pavel Theiner, two Prague-based journalists, claimed that Flight 367 had been mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by the Czechoslovak Air Force at an altitude of 800 metres (2,600 ft). The two claimed that the Czechoslovak State Security had conjured up Vulović's record fall as part of a cover-up. 

They also hypothesized that the call received by the Kvällsposten, claiming responsibility for the aircraft's downing, was a hoax. The Czech Civil Aviation Authority dismissed the journalists' claim, calling it a conspiracy theory. 

Hornung-Andersen conceded that the pair's evidence was only circumstantial. Vulović said that she was aware of the journalists' claims, but stated that because she had no memory of the event, she could not confirm or deny the allegations. Guinness World Records continues to list her as the record-holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.

In the last years of her life, Vulović lived on a pension of €300 per month in her dilapidated Belgrade apartment. "I don't know what to say when people say I was lucky," she remarked. "Life is so hard today." 

Vulović lamented that her mother and father might not have died prematurely had she not been aboard Flight 367, stating that the incident not only ruined her life, but also that of her parents. 

She only occasionally granted interviews and declined numerous requests, most notably from Oprah Winfrey and the BBC, saying that she was "tired" of discussing her fall. 

By the time she had reached her sixties, Vulović's deteriorating health prevented her from taking part in annual commemorations at Srbská Kamenice, which she had previously attended for many years. 

In December 2016, Vulović's friends became concerned for her well-being after she abruptly stopped answering her telephone. 

On 23 December, locksmiths discovered Vulović's lifeless body in her apartment after forcing open the door. 

Vulović's friends said that she had struggled with heart ailments in the years leading up to her death. 

She was buried in Belgrade's New Cemetery on 27 December.