Vesna Vulović

Vesna Vulović (Весна Вуловић, ; 3 January 1950 – 23 December 2016) was a Serbian flight attendant who survived the highest fall without a parachute: 10.16 km or 33,330 feet.

Vesna Vulović was born in Belgrade on 3 January 1950.

Her father was a businessman and her mother was a fitness instructor.

Driven by her love of the Beatles, Vulović travelled to the United Kingdom after completing her first year of university, hoping to improve her English-language skills.

"I initially stayed with my parents' friends in Newbury," she recalled, "but wanted to move to London. It was there that I met up with a friend who suggested we go to Stockholm. When I told my parents I was living in the Swedish capital, they thought of the drugs and the sex and told me to come home at once."

Upon returning to Belgrade, Vulović decided to become a flight attendant after seeing one of her friends in a flight attendant's uniform.

"She looked so nice and had just been to London for the day," Vulović recalled.

"I thought, 'Why shouldn't I be an air hostess? I could go to London once a month'."

She joined JAT, the national flag carrier and dominant airline of Yugoslavia, in 1971.

She was the sole survivor after an explosion tore through the baggage compartment of JAT Flight 367 on 26 January 1972, causing it to crash near Srbská Kamenice, Czechoslovakia (now part of the Czech Republic).

Air safety investigators attributed the explosion to a briefcase bomb.

The Yugoslav authorities suspected that émigré Croatian nationalists were to blame, but no one was ever arrested.

Following the bombing, Vulović spent days in a coma and was hospitalized for several months.

She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis.

These injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.

Vulović made an almost complete recovery but continued to walk with a limp.

She had no memory of the incident and had no qualms about flying in the aftermath of the crash.

Despite her willingness to resume work as a flight attendant, Jat Airways (JAT) gave her a desk job negotiating freight contracts, feeling her presence on flights would attract too much publicity.

Vulović became a celebrity in Yugoslavia and was deemed a national hero.

The secondary crew of JAT Flight 367, flying from Stockholm to Belgrade with stopovers in Copenhagen and Zagreb, arrived in Denmark on the morning of 25 January 1972.

According to Vulović, she was not scheduled to be on Flight 367, and JAT had confused her for another flight attendant also named Vesna.

Nevertheless, Vulović said that she was excited to travel to Denmark because it was her first time visiting the country.

The crew had the entire afternoon and the following morning to themselves.

Vulović wished to go sightseeing but her colleagues insisted that they go shopping.

"Everybody wanted to buy something for his or her family," she recalled.

"So I had to go shopping with them. They seemed to know that they would die. They didn't talk about it, but I saw ... I felt for them. And the captain was locked in his room for 24 hours. He didn't want to go out at all. In the morning, during breakfast, the co-pilot was talking about his son and daughter as if nobody else had a son or daughter."

Flight 367 departed from Stockholm Arlanda Airport at 1:30 p.m. on 26 January.

The aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, landed at Copenhagen Airport at 2:30 p.m., whereupon Vulović and her colleagues boarded the plane.

"As it was late, we were in the terminal and saw it park," Vulović said.

"I saw all the passengers and crew deplane. One man seemed terribly annoyed. It was not only me that noticed him either. Other crew members saw him, as did the station manager in Copenhagen. I think it was the man who put the bomb in the baggage. I think he had checked in a bag in Stockholm, got off in Copenhagen and never re-boarded the flight."

Flight 367 departed from Copenhagen Airport at 3:15 p.m. At 4:01 p.m., an explosion tore through the DC-9's baggage compartment.

The explosion caused the aircraft to break apart over the then-Czechoslovak village of Srbská Kamenice.

Vulović was the only survivor of the 28 passengers and crew.

She was discovered by villager Bruno Honke, who heard her screaming amid the wreckage.

Vulović was fired from JAT in the early 1990s after taking part in anti-government protests during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but avoided arrest as the government was concerned about the negative publicity that her imprisonment would bring.

She continued her work as a pro-democracy activist until the Socialist Party of Serbia was ousted from power during the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000.

Vulović later campaigned on behalf of the Democratic Party, advocating Serbia's entry into the European Union.

Her final years were spent in seclusion, and she struggled with survivor guilt.

Having divorced, Vulović lived alone in her Belgrade apartment on a small pension until her death in 2016.

She was commemorated in the 2024 Valencian pop hit Rècord Mundial.