Vesna Vulovic Airplane

January 23, 2012 by staff

Vesna Vulovic Airplane, Vesna Vulovic born 3 January 1950, is a Serbian former flight attendant. She holds the world record, according to the Guinness Book of Records, for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,330 ft).
The explosion of JAT Flight 367, on which Vulovic was a flight attendant, occurred on 26 January 1972, over Srbsk? Kamenice in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), and caused it to break apart. The 22-year old was not scheduled to be on that flight; she had been mixed up with another female flight attendant who was also named Vesna.

The official report of the Czechoslovak investigation commission, which was handed over to the ICAO on 7 May 1974, stated that there had been an explosion in the front baggage compartment of the plane. The Czechoslovak secret service (St?tn? bezpe??nost), which was leading the investigation, presented parts of an alarm clock ten days after the crash which they claimed came from a bomb. The report concluded that the plane was torn apart by that bomb.

On the morning of 27 January 1972 an anonymous man called the newspaper Kv?llsposten published in Malm?, Sweden, claiming in broken Swedish that he was a Croat and member of a Nationalist group that brought the bomb onto the plane. Apart from this no further evidence was ever found that this was a terrorist attack. Nevertheless, shortly after the phone call the Yugoslav government blamed the Usta??e. According to the official report the explosion tore the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 to pieces in mid-air, and Vulovic was the only survivor. Ever since it was said that she survived because she had been in the rear part of the plane. However, Vulovic states that she was found in the middle section right above the wings. That tallies with what was said by Bruno Henke, the man who saved Vulovic’s life by rescuing her from the wrecked fuselage on the ground.