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Vesna Vulovic 1950 - 2016

Vesna Vulovic, survived 33,333ft fall from bombed aircraft

Vesna Vulovic, who has died aged 66, was a Yugoslav flight attendant who miraculously survived a fall of 33,333 feet without a parachute when her airliner exploded above Czechoslovakia in January 1972.

Then 22, Vulovic was not supposed to be aboard the JAT DC-9 on January 26, but a mix-up with another stewardess with the same first name meant she joined the Belgrade-bound flight at Copenhagen. The last thing that she could remember was greeting the passengers.

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Survivor of 10,160m free fall dies aged 66

Former Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was the sole survivor of a 1972 plane crash was found dead at her home in Belgrade.

An hour into the journey the aeroplane disintegrated above Srbska Kamenice, now in the Czech Republic. A Czech secret service investigation concluded that a bomb had been planted in the baggage hold, supposedly by Croat nationalists.

Vulovic fell in the central piece of fuselage, her body pinned into place by a food trolley. Pine trees and snow cushioned the final impact. Her screams were heard by a woodsman who had served as a German Army medic in the war and knew how to treat her bleeding. None of the other 27 people aboard survived.

The first thing she did on coming round from her coma was to ask for a cigarette.

Doctors found that she had a fractured skull, three crushed or broken vertebrae and two broken legs. The three-inch heels had been torn off her stilettos. She was temporarily paralysed and in a coma for a month. "When I saw a newspaper and read what had happened," she said, "I nearly died of shock."

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Her survival was not unprecedented. In 1944, for instance, Nicholas Alkemade had recovered from a fall of 18,000 feet in similar circumstances after jumping from his stricken Lancaster bomber.

Albeit with a twisted spine, she walked again and returned to work at JAT, taking a desk job. She did fly occasionally and, having no memory of the accident, had no fear about doing so.

Vulovic was born in Belgrade on January 3, 1950. Her father was a businessman and her mother a fitness instructor. She joined the Yugoslav national airline after seeing a friend wearing its uniform.

She continued to work until 1990, when she lost her job for criticising the extreme nationalism of Serbia's leader Slobodan Milosevic.

In 2009, several Prague-based journalists threw doubt on the official version of the accident. Claiming to have seen secret files about a cover-up, they stated that the airliner had in fact been shot down by a Czechoslovak MiG after being mistaken for a hostile aircraft.

Moreover, they said, the jet had broken up at a much lower altitude than given out and the story of Vulović's fall had been cooked up to distract the media's gaze. They admitted, however, that their evidence was only circumstantial, and it appeared to be contradicted by data from the black boxes independently analysed in Holland.

Latterly Vulovic, who was divorced, lived alone in Belgrade with three cats. Her great consolation was her faith, which she rediscovered after her ordeal. She ascribed her survival to St Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, on the eve of whose feast she was saved.

"It made me an optimist," she said of her experience. "If you can survive what I survived, you can survive anything."

The Telegraph, London