Vesna Vulović, aged 66, died in her Belgrade
apartment over Christmas. Nearly 45 years earlier she had fallen 33,000 feet
from a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 that blew up over the Czech Republic en route
from Stockholm to Belgrade.
Vulović, a flight attendant, was the only
survivor among the 28 people on board. She was trapped in the tail as the
aircraft plummeted to a mountainous area, and it is thought that pine trees and
the snow softened the impact.
The Serbian woman was rescued by a woodsman who
heard her screams. She was rushed to hospital after suffering a fractured
skull, two crushed vertebrae and a broken pelvis, ribs and legs, but eventually
made an almost complete recovery. Vulović’s fall would feature in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest
anyone had ever survived without a parachute.
For a long time it was suspected the DC-9 had
been brought down by a bomb on board, but in recent years a new theory emerged
that it had been shot down by mistake by the then Czechoslovak air force.
(For other stories of remarkable escapes, see my
posts of 4 July 2009, 16 January 2010, and 22 March 2011.)
