A flight attendant who survived a 33,000-foot fall to earth after a bomb went off on the plane she was on says she is lucky to be a live but is like a cat with nine lives.
More than 50 years ago, on January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulović was onboard the JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 between Sweden and Serbia when the aircraft exploded into three pieces over the Czech Republic.
Everyone on board was killed, apart from Vesna who plummeted six miles towards to snowy ground and somehow survived the incredible fall - which to this day is the highest someone has fallen without a parachute and survived.
The flight had been scheduled to make two stopovers - first in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then in Zagreb, Croatia - but it never made it to the latter destination. Vesna wasn't even meant to be on the plane at the time of the crash and in a 2002 interview she revealed the only reason the 23-year-old was onboard was because she had been confused with another stewardess with the same first name.
Exactly 46 minutes after take off, just after 4pm that day, an explosion in the luggage compartment ripped the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 plane into three pieces and passengers and crew members were sucked out of the plane into freezing conditions. The majority of them fell to their death.
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Everyone else onboard the flight died after a bomb went off (Wikipedia/clipperarctic)According to the Czechoslovak Civil Aviation Authority, the explosion was caused by a briefcase bomb placed in the aircraft’s baggage compartment.
On the same day as the tragedy of Flight 367, another bomb was set off on a train between Vienna and Zagreb, injuring six people, the Guinness World Records archives states.
The day after these events, Swedish newspaper Kvällsposten received a phone call from a self-described Croatian nationalist, who took credit for bringing down Flight 367.
Vesna's astonishing survival was put down to the fact she was pinned down by a food cart in the aircraft's main body as it hurtled toward woodland near a small Czech village. It then crashed into thick snow, which is also believed to have been a factor in why Vesna survived.
The air hostess suffered life-threatening injuries and was put into a coma for days after suffering a fractured skull, two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, a fractured pelvis, several broken ribs and temporary paralysis below the waist.
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In the aftermath of the wreckage, the young woman's physicians believed her low blood pressure meant she quickly passed out when the cabin depressurised and this prevented her heart from bursting upon impact.
Vesna was found screaming inside the broken plane by villager Bruno Honke who also happened to be a former Second World War medic. He gave her "vital" first aid before emergency services arrived.
Around 10 months later, after an incredible recovery, Vesna was able to walk again with a slight limp due to her spine twisting and she became a national hero in Yugoslavia where she was honoured by president Josip Broz Tito and even had a song - dubbed Vesna the Stewardess - written about her. To this day, she has no recollection of the crash.
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She was inducted into the Guinness World Records Hall of Fame in 1985 where she was presented a medal by The Beatles legend Paul McCartney for achieving the highest fall survived without a parachute.
No arrests were ever made despite someone seemingly taking credit for the devastating crash, but authorities suspected Croatian terrorist group, the Ustashe, were behind the bombings. In total, 128 terror attacks were carried out by Croatian nationalists against Yugoslavia between 1962 and 1982.
The cause of Flight 367’s explosion and subsequent crash has been subject to several conspiracy theories over the years, the most popular of which suggested that the plane was mistakenly shot down by Czechoslovak anti-air missiles at a much lower altitude of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
However, this claim was debunked by flight data obtained from the aircraft’s black boxes, which provided exact data regarding the plane’s altitude, acceleration, direction and speed at the time of the explosion.
When she recovered from her injuries, Vesna carried on working at JAT Airlines in a desk-based role but was eventually fired in the early 1990s for taking part in anti-government protests opposing Slobodan Milošević, who was the country's president at the time. Milošević was later tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity. Vesna passed away in December 2016 at the age of 66.
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