The woman who fell from the sky… and survived ! (from 1972)

Today's story takes us back to January 26, 1972. Vesna Vulović, a 22-year-old flight attendant from Serbia, was working on Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367, a DC-9 aircraft traveling from Copenhagen to Belgrade with a stop in Zagreb. It was just another day at work for Vesna, who had joined the airline less than a year before. Little did she know, this routine flight would change her life forever.

Flight 367 was carrying 28 passengers and crew. Everything seemed normal as the plane cruised at an altitude of 33,000 feet over what was then Czechoslovakia. But in an instant, the tranquility was shattered. At 4:01 PM, a sudden and powerful explosion ripped through the plane. It was later suspected that a briefcase bomb, planted by Croatian nationalists, caused the blast, though the exact cause remains unconfirmed.

The explosion tore the aircraft into pieces. Passengers and crew were thrown out into the freezing sky, plummeting to their deaths. But Vesna’s fate was different. Trapped by a food cart in the plane’s fuselage, she remained inside as the wreckage spiraled towards the ground. The section she was in, still partly intact, fell rapidly, crashing into a thickly wooded mountainside near the village of Srbská Kamenice.

When the wreckage hit the ground, it was the dense trees and snow that saved Vesna’s life. The impact was severe, but the fuselage didn’t disintegrate completely. Local villagers, the first to arrive at the scene, were astonished to hear faint cries for help coming from the twisted metal. To their disbelief, they found Vesna alive but gravely injured.

Vesna was rushed to a nearby hospital, where doctors were shocked by her condition. She had suffered a fractured skull, crushed vertebrae, broken legs, and several other severe injuries. Most alarming was her spinal cord injury, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. Vesna was placed in a coma for several days, her life hanging by a thread.

As news of the crash spread, so did word of Vesna’s miraculous survival. Reporters, medical experts, and aviation specialists were baffled. How could anyone survive such a fall? Theories began to emerge. Some believed it was the low-pressure system caused by the decompression, others thought it was Vesna’s position in the fuselage, cushioned by the food cart, that saved her. The snowy landscape also played a crucial role, absorbing much of the impact.

After days in a coma, Vesna defied the odds once again—she woke up. Confused and in immense pain, she had no memory of the explosion or the fall. Her first thoughts were of her parents, who were anxiously waiting for news. Vesna’s recovery was nothing short of extraordinary. Despite her severe injuries, she regained partial use of her legs after months of intensive rehabilitation. However, the psychological scars ran deep. The loss of her colleagues and passengers haunted her, and she struggled with survivor’s guilt for years.

In the years that followed, Vesna’s story became a symbol of hope and resilience. She was celebrated as a national heroine in Yugoslavia and even entered the Guinness World Records for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. But despite the fame, Vesna remained humble, often downplaying her miraculous survival as mere luck. “I was just in the right place at the right time,” she would say.

Vesna Vulović’s incredible story is a reminder of the human body’s capacity to endure the impossible. While science may never fully explain how she survived, her will to live and determination to recover continue to inspire people around the world. Vesna’s life was marked by tragedy, but she chose to live it with courage and grace, proving that sometimes, miracles do happen.