Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulović, 23, survived a 33,000-foot fall after a terrorist attack detonated a bomb on her airplane on Jan. 25, 1972.
In an interview 30 years later with Philip Baum on Green Light, Vulović told her own story. This catastrophe began by chance when her employer, Jat Airways, mixed up her schedule with another attendant named Vesna. The scheduled flight was to Denmark, and she said since she had a deep love for the Beatles, she “always dreamed of staying in a Sheraton Hotel.” She took the shift and was “very happy.”
She recalled that one particularly grumpy passenger had checked his bag for the connecting flight, but didn’t board. She believes that the bomb was placed inside his bag.
“The last thing I remember is boarding the plane by the rear door and seeing a few women cleaning the plane.” She has no recollection of the flight itself.
How did Vesna Vulović survive the fall?
All of the 28 people on the flight died except for Vulović, and since she has no memory of the flight or the landing, no one is quite sure how she survived.
Some believed she was belted into a seat that fell into a river. A Belgrade newspaper reported she was in the back of the plane which landed at the perfect angle on a snow-covered slope upon impact. Doctors told Vulović that her heart should have burst upon impact, but attributed her survival to low blood pressure.
Where did she land?
The plane’s fuselage (main body) separated from the rest of the plane and landed in a “heavily wooded area near the Czechoslovak village of Srbská Kamenice,” according to GWR.
Baum asked about the theories, saying, “The reports say that you fell in a part of the fuselage that remained intact. Some of the reports said that you were in the back of the aircraft.”
Vulović replied, “No I was not in the back. The man who found me he told me that I was in the middle part of the plane. I was found with my head down and my colleague on top of me. One part of my body with my leg was in the plane and my head was out of the plane. A catering trolley was pinned against my spine and kept me in the plane.”
Former World War II medic Bruno Honke found Vulović “screaming inside the wreckage,” according to GWR.
What were Vesna Vulović’s injuries?
She had a broken skull that led to hemorrhaging, three broken vertebrae (one that was completely crushed), a broken pelvis and broken legs. Though she was paralyzed from the waist down when she woke up in the hospital, she eventually regained motion and the ability to walk.
BBC reported that Vulović made a full recovery and returned to the airline to work at a desk job until she was let go in 1990 “after taking part in protests against President Slobodan Milosevic but avoided arrest.”
She told The New York Times, “I am like a cat, I have had nine lives. But if nationalist forces in this country prevail, my heart will burst. … I don’t think of the accident every day. I am strong. But the politics in this country are making me tired. My heart can’t take much more. I have had enough.”
What was Vesna Vulović’s cause of death?
In 2016, at the age of 66, a Serbian radio station reported Vulović’s death without specifying the cause, per The New York Times.