Vesna Vulovic: The flight attendant who fell 10km in a plane bombing and survived

When a briefcase bomb exploded on a Yugoslavian plane in 1972, 23 passengers and four crewmembers were sucked out of the wreckage. The chances of any surviving were surely zero.

But, locals from a nearby village rushed to the wreckage and found 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovic still strapped into her seat and very much alive.

She fell from a distance of ten kilometres up – no-one has ever fallen from that high without a parachute and survived.

But it was a combination of unlikely factors that make her survival so extraordinary.

The flight

As a young woman in communist Yugoslavia, Ms Vulovic was driven to travel by her obsession with The Beatles.

She moved to London as a university student, then became a stewardess for Yugoslavia airline JAT in 1971.

The following January she was part of the secondary crew of Flight 367 from Stockholm to Belgrade, with stopovers in Copenhagen and Zagreb.

She was not supposed to be on the flight, but had put her hand up because she had never been to Denmark before.

She joined the flight in Copenhagen, in enough time to watch the first bunch of passengers disembark.

"One man seemed terribly annoyed. It was not only me that noticed him either. Other crew members saw him, as did the station manager in Copenhagen," she told Aviation Security.

"I think it was the man who put the bomb in the baggage. I think he had checked in a bag in Stockholm, got off in Copenhagen and never re-boarded the flight."

She recalled boarding the flight, but she doesn't remember anything else of that day.

The explosion

The black boxes aboard Flight 367 showed that at 4.01pm on January 26, the plane dropped out of the sky.

An explosion in the baggage department split the plane into several pieces, sucking the passengers and other flight crew out of the plane.

But Ms Vulovic was pinned in the fuselage by a food cart, keeping her in place as it fell to the ground.

Her section of the aircraft landed at an angle on a snowy mountainside in then-Czechoslovakia.

The trees and the snow, as well as the angle of the mountain, made for a softer landing.

When local villager Bruno Honke arrived at the scene, he found Ms Vulovic screaming, barefoot and covered in blood, with a colleague's body on top of her.

A former World War II medic, Mr Honke was able to keep her alive under help arrived.

Ms Vulovic suffered two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, a fractured pelvis and a fractured skull.

But she was alive.

And a medical condition that should have stopped her from becoming a flight attendant probably saved her life.

The recovery

The impact with the ground should have been enough to kill Ms Vulovic.

The sudden blow would have caused an ordinary person's heart to burst, killing them instantly.

But doctors told Ms Vulovic that her very low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly.

As a result, her heart did not burst.

Low-blood pressure typically keeps people from becoming flight attendants, but she said she had drunk so much coffee the day of her medical exam that her heart rate was faster than usual.

She recovered in a hospital in Prague before being moved to one in Belgrade, where she was kept under 24-hour police guard.

Because she had survived the crash, authorities feared she would be made an assassination target by the Croatian separatist terrorists responsible for the bombing.

Later life

She had no memory of the crash, so Ms Vulovic was perfectly happy to resume her duties as a flight attendant.

But because she had become a national hero in Yugoslavia, the airline did not want her flying for fear her presence would make other travellers anxious.

Instead she was given a desk job.

The granddaughter of the man who rescued Ms Vulovic was named Vesna in her honour when she was born six weeks after the crash.

She was given an award from the Guinness World Records, presented to her by her hero Paul McCartney.

And when Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in 2000, she used her celebrity to campaign for the centre-left Democratic Party and for her nation's entry into the European Union.

Ms Vulovic retired on a pension in Belgrade, where she died of heart problems in 2016.

But despite her incredible survival, she never considered herself lucky.

"Everybody thinks I am lucky, but they a mistaken. If I were lucky I would never had this accident," she said.

"To die is pure destiny - in a plane or in a car or in the street. The funny thing is that, if you have to die the easiest way to do so is in a plane. So that's it, it was not my day for dying."

Ms Vulovic's survival story is reminiscent of Juliane Koepcke, a 17-year-old who lived through a 3km plunge to the ground in a plane explosion just a month earlier, Christmas Eve, 1971.

Read that incredible story here.