Sole Survivors Of Airline Crashes
3) Vesna Vulović
Vulović is the world record holder for having fallen from the greatest height and survived to tell the tale. At the time of the incident in 1972, she was a Serbian air hostess. The plane she was on was cruising at over 10,000 m in the air, yes, that’s 10 whole kilometres up. Or 6 and a bit miles.
JAT Flight 367 exploded and was scattered into separate parts. As often happens with these types of incidents it seems, Vulović wasn’t even meant to be flying that day, there was a rota switch up with a girl of a similar name.
The explosion that brought down the jet was ascribed to terrorism; one man had called a newspaper claiming the attack for a nationalist group, although no further evidence was found of the connection.
Vulović escaped the crash with a fractured skull and three broken vertebrae (one was completely destroyed). She was in a coma for 27 days and paralysed from the waist down for a short time…
I was in the middle part of the plane. I was found with my head down and my colleague on top of me. One part of my body with my leg was in the plane and my head was out of the plane. A catering trolley was pinned against my spine and kept me in the plane. The man who found me, says I was very lucky. He was in the German Army as a medic during World War II. He knew how to treat me at the site of the accident…
Vulović continued working for the airline, but from behind a desk, although she has no fear of flying surprisingly. She was eventually fired from her airline job for her constant and vehement protests about the overpowering regime of Slobodan Milošević. Vulović had become a national hero which probably saved her life for a second time, Milošević wasn’t exactly known for his mercy when it came to dissenters. Still to this day she is very vocal on the politics du jour.
Paul McCartney presented Vulović with a Guinness World Record for having fallen the furthest (10,160 metres) and survived in 1985. However, years on people have been challenging this impressive height. Rumours (and some official documents) suggest that the flight may have been accidentally shot down by the Czechoslovak Air Force just a few hundred rather than thousand metres up. Vesna Vulović refutes the claims but she has no memory from the time of boarding onwards so can’t be too much help.
The jury’s still out. But either way she was still a sole survivor.
More sole survivors on the next page…
