The Woman Who Fell 33,000 Feet

Vesna Vulovic, a 22-year-old flight attendant, was in the tail section when the aircraft broke apart. She fell more than six miles, still strapped inside a portion of the fuselage, and struck a snow-covered mountainside near the village of Srbska Kamenice. A local man named Bruno Honke, a former World War II medic, found her in the wreckage and kept her alive until rescue teams arrived.

Vulovic had fractured her skull, broken both legs and three vertebrae, and was in a coma for 27 days. She was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. Her survival was attributed to a combination of factors that investigators could only partially explain. The section of fuselage she was trapped in may have acted as a crude sled, slowing her descent as it tumbled through the air. The deep snow on the mountainside absorbed some of the impact. Her position in the rear of the aircraft, wedged between a food cart and the fuselage wall, may have provided a degree of cushioning. And her low blood pressure—she had fainted before the explosion—might have prevented her heart from bursting on impact.

She had no memory of the flight or the fall. Her last recollection before waking in the hospital was greeting passengers as they boarded in Copenhagen. Doctors had to explain what had happened to her.

Vulovic spent months in the hospital and underwent extensive rehabilitation. Against medical expectations, she recovered enough to walk again, though she used a cane for the rest of her life. She returned to work at JAT in a desk role and became something of a national hero in Yugoslavia. Guinness World Records recognized her fall as the highest survived without a parachute, a record that still stands.

She rarely discussed the event publicly, noting once in an interview that she wasn't afraid of flying but no longer enjoyed it. She died in Belgrade in 2016 at the age of 66.