January 26, 1972. The 22-year-old air hostess Vesna Vulovic is boarding the plane from Stockholm, along with 27 other people. The flight would end up in Belgrade, having first made stops in Copenhagen and Zagreb.
Vesna Vulovic, in fact, would never get on that plane. Her name was confused with the name of another colleague, as a result of which she boarded the flight "JAT Yugoslav 367", taking the place of her namesake. She felt that her luck smiled on her. She loved her job and loved to travel and get to know new places.
After the take-off of the McDonnell Douglas DC 9 aircraft, and while offering food and drinks to the passengers, Vesna Vulovi, heard a deafening explosion, according to her testimony.
Twenty-seven of the 27 occupants and crew members were killed instantly when they were thrown out of the aircraft, while she herself fell… free fall from 28 meters without a parachute and survived.
The wreckage of the plane fell in the village of Kamenice on the border of East Germany and present-day Czech Republic.
Rescuers located the 22-year-old girl. He had broken arms, legs and craniocerebral injuries. He was in a coma for many days and paralyzed for months, but eventually recovered. But then he did not remember anything. The doctors who rescued her explained to her what had happened. Vesna was shocked but did not get any post-traumatic shock from the experience. It is said that he never recovered the memories of that day.
Many surgeries followed and he was able to walk again. After her recovery she continued to work for the same airline, this time as ground staff.
"Whenever I think about the accident, I have a strong and heavy feeling of guilt that I managed and only I survived", she emphasizes, concluding that "for hours I think that maybe it would have been better if I had not survived".
The then Yugoslav government blamed Croatian nationalist terrorists, members of the Croatian National Movement, who sought the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the emergence of Croatia as an independent state. In 2009, however, new evidence emerged that the fatal JAT 367 flight may have exploded after the plane was accidentally shot down by a missile that struck it "accidentally" during a military exercise in the former Czechoslovakia.
For this reason, two Czech journalists question the "miracle" of that day, and attribute the salvation of Vesna Vulovic to another factor. The two investigators concluded that the Yugoslav aircraft was shot down over Czechoslovak territory, but lost a lot of altitude and eventually crashed not at 11.000, but only at 800 meters above the ground, from which the occupants fell.
Despite thorough investigations into the accident, it was never possible to determine with certainty who and why blew up the fatal plane. flight.
Back in her country, she was welcomed as a national heroine. She was nicknamed "the heroine of the Cold War" and was honored by the then Yugoslav leader, Tito.
A few years later, she was officially awarded the Guinness Award, for the record of survival from the biggest drop in history. The widely accepted explanation for how he survived the 33.000 feet is based on a number of coincidences.
At the time of the explosion, Vesna Vulovic was in the back of the plane. There, one of the carts carrying the food fell on her and stuck her to the wall, preventing her from falling off the aircraft. Thus, when the tail of the aircraft hit the hillside, the snow helped to normalize the collision and the part where Vesna was to slide more gently into the ground.
But there is another scenario around the miracle of her survival. With a history of low blood pressure, Vesna knew he was unlikely to undergo medical examinations. So before the test, he drank a lot of coffee, hoping to keep his blood pressure high enough. And it worked.
After the accident and the investigations, the doctors came to the conclusion that what would deprive her of the profession she loved so much, maybe in the end was what saved her life. It was believed that low blood pressure prevented her heart from exploding when Vesna fell on a mountain slope.
She spent the last years of her life quite poor. She refused to talk about the incident, even when she was suggested by world-famous names such as Oprah Winfrey and the BBC. Some say that because of the amnesia he could not remember anything from that day, neither from the crash nor from the explosion.
Vesna Vulovic became an optimistic symbol of fortune, although she had a different view of it.
She said she never felt lucky to survive that day. "I would be lucky if I had never boarded that plane." An interview in 1973, republished by the non-profit digital archive Yugopapir, likened her to her green cat, Cicka, who also had a history of surviving many falls from great heights.
In another interview, she said the accident ruined their own lives as well as hers.
Vesna Vulovic passed away in 2016, at the age of 66 from a heart attack. The news of her death was received with a mixture of nostalgia and sadness.