On 26 January 1972, a 22-year-old Yugoslav flight attendant named Vesna Vulović was working a JAT DC-9 service from Stockholm to Belgrade via Copenhagen. She had only joined the airline a few months earlier. She had been assigned to the flight by mistake — the airline had confused her with another stewardess of the same first name — and she had not even been asked whether she wanted to swap. She was simply on the manifest.

What happened in the next forty-five minutes would put her name into Guinness World Records and keep it there for the rest of her life. Vesna Vulović became the only human being ever to fall ten kilometres without a parachute and live.

The flight, the gap, the survival

JAT Flight 367 was at cruise altitude over the small Czech village of Srbská Kamenice when something detonated in the forward baggage hold. The official cause has never been definitively settled — theories range from a Croatian-Ustaše bomb to an air-defence missile fired in error by Czechoslovak air defences. The aircraft broke apart in mid-air. The rear fuselage section, with Vulović and the food trolley still inside, separated from the rest of the airframe and fell as a single intact piece into the snow-covered forest below.

The combination of factors that allowed her to live is what aviation forensics texts now describe as “providential.” First, she was in the tail section, where the structural deformation absorbed the impact rather than transmitting it directly to her body. Second, she was pinned between a trolley and a galley wall, which kept her body straight through the fall. Third, the fuselage struck a heavily snow-covered, steeply angled forest slope, which dissipated impact energy over hundreds of metres of contact rather than a single point. Fourth — and perhaps decisively — she had low blood pressure, which she had concealed from JAT medical examiners; her circulatory system did not rupture under the deceleration the way most people’s would.

The rescue and the long recovery

A Czech villager named Bruno Honke found her in the wreckage some thirty minutes after the crash. She was breathing but unconscious, with a fractured skull, three crushed vertebrae, broken legs, a fractured pelvis, and several broken ribs. Honke — who had served as a medic in the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War — kept her alive in the snow until rescue arrived.

She woke from her coma 27 days later in a Prague hospital. Her first question, on regaining lucidity, was whether she could have a cigarette.

Vesna spent sixteen months in hospital and rehabilitation. She had no memory of the flight, the explosion, or the fall. Her doctors believed this was probably a protective mechanism — what neurologists now call dissociative amnesia. She regained the ability to walk. She returned to work at JAT a year and a half after the crash, though never again as cabin crew — she was assigned to a negotiating job at the airline’s headquarters in Belgrade.

A life after the fall

Vesna became, instantly, a national hero in Yugoslavia — a country that did not have many female celebrities and had not had many cheerful stories in 1972. She became a fierce campaigner against the Milošević regime in the 1990s, reportedly losing her job at JAT for her opposition to the regime. Remarkably, she had no fear of flying afterwards — she had no memory of the crash — and in 1985 she travelled to London to collect her Guinness World Record, presented to her by Paul McCartney.

The Guinness record — “the highest fall survived without a parachute” — has stood for more than half a century. Later investigations have questioned the official altitude — a 2009 journalistic inquiry argued the aircraft may have broken up far lower than 10,160 metres — but Guinness has never withdrawn the record. There have been later, lower-altitude survivals from aircraft accidents (Juliane Koepcke fell roughly three kilometres into the Peruvian jungle in December 1971), but no one has ever come close to Vulović’s 10,160 metres.

She died of natural causes in December 2016, aged 66, in her apartment in Belgrade. Her funeral was attended by aviation historians, journalists, former JAT colleagues, and a handful of Czech relatives of Bruno Honke, who had stayed in touch with her family for the rest of her life. The Belgrade aviation museum keeps a small permanent exhibition about her. Her name is still in the Guinness book. Nobody is expected to take it from her.

Sources: The New York Times, Guinness World Records, BBC Witness History, The Independent obituary (December 2016), Aviation Safety Network.