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A 22-year-old flight attendant fell six miles from the sky and lived to tell about it.
On January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulović boarded JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 because of an airline scheduling mix-up with another stewardess who shared her first name. Hours later, a bomb tore the DC-9 apart over Czechoslovakia, and Vulović became the only person aboard to survive a fall that still stands as the highest ever survived without a parachute.
- Vulović fell 33,330 feet (10,160 meters) after a suitcase bomb, attributed to Croatian Ustaše separatists, detonated aboard JAT Flight 367 over Srbská Kamenice, killing 27 of the 28 people on board.
- She survived pinned inside a section of fuselage by a food catering trolley, which kept her from being pulled into the freezing, depressurized air, and the wreckage struck a snowy, wooded mountainside at a glancing angle that softened the impact.
- In 1985, the Guinness Book of World Records officially certified her fall as the highest ever survived without a parachute; she died in Belgrade in December 2016 at age 66.
Historical Events in Czechoslovakia
Flight 367 was climbing over Srbská Kamenice when the bomb went off, breaking the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 into pieces in midair. Vulović wasn’t blown into open freefall the way the story is often retold. She stayed inside a chunk of the fractured fuselage, and a heavy catering trolley wedged against her and a deceased colleague, holding her in place rather than letting the depressurized cabin suck her out into the sky.
That detail matters to the physics of her survival. Falling inside a section of the plane, rather than as a lone body in freefall, changed how the wreckage behaved on the way down and how the force of the crash was distributed when it finally hit ground.
The Landing That Shouldn’t Have Been Survivable
The fuselage section came down on a heavily wooded, snow-covered mountainside and struck at a glancing angle instead of straight on, which absorbed a significant share of the force generated at terminal velocity. Doctors who later studied the case also pointed to Vulović’s unusually low blood pressure as a factor that may have kept her heart from rupturing on impact.
She was found screaming in the wreckage by Bruno Honke, a villager and former World War II medic, who gave her first aid on the mountainside until rescue crews reached the crash site. Her injuries were severe: a fractured skull with a brain hemorrhage, three broken vertebrae with one crushed, a shattered pelvis, several broken ribs, and two broken legs.
She fell 33,330 feet inside a piece of the plane — and walked again within ten months.
A Recovery Doctors Couldn’t Fully Explain
Vulović spent days in a coma and woke up paralyzed from the waist down, only to regain the ability to walk within ten months, a recovery timeline that astonished the physicians treating her. She was left with permanent amnesia covering roughly an hour before the crash to a month afterward, a gap she could never fill in even in later interviews.
She went on to work a desk job at JAT and, notably, never developed a fear of flying afterward. In 1985, more than a decade after the crash, Guinness officially certified her fall as the highest ever survived without a parachute — a record that still stands, in the same category of extraordinary human-endurance benchmarks documented in cases like Robert Wadlow’s.
Enduring Significance of the Case
Investigators ultimately attributed the bombing to Croatian separatists, though details of the plot were never fully settled in the decades that followed. What’s undisputed is the physical chain of events: the trolley that pinned her, the angled impact on a snowy slope, and the low blood pressure that kept her heart intact — three separate strokes of chance that all had to line up for anyone to walk away from a fall of six-plus miles. It’s the kind of survival story that sits alongside extreme-altitude feats covered elsewhere, from stunt aviation like record-setting flights to freefall records set on purpose rather than by accident.
Vulović died in Belgrade in December 2016 at 66, still holding the Guinness record nearly 45 years after the crash — a title nobody has come close to matching, because surviving it in the first place required Bruno Honke to find her screaming in the snow before anything else could go wrong.
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