A Plane Broke Apart At 33,000 Feet, Only One Woman Survived

When passengers boarded JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 on January 26, 1972, it looked like a routine journey from Stockholm to Belgrade with a stop in Copenhagen. But somewhere over what was then Czechoslovakia, the aircraft exploded mid-air at an altitude of around 33,000 feet.

Out of the 28 people on board, only one survived.

That survivor was 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulović, who would later enter the Guinness World Records for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.

Investigators later concluded that a bomb hidden in the baggage compartment likely caused the explosion. The aircraft broke apart in the sky, scattering debris across snowy mountains and forests near the village of Srbská Kamenice in what is now the Czech Republic.

What happened next still sounds almost impossible.

According to reports, Vulović remained trapped inside part of the aircraft fuselage as it fell. Some accounts say she was pinned down by a food cart, which may have stopped her from being thrown clear of the wreckage. The broken section of the plane reportedly crashed into a heavily wooded, snow-covered hillside, which helped absorb some of the impact.

A local villager and former World War II medic named Bruno Honke found her alive in the wreckage after hearing her cries. She had suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured skull, broken ribs, crushed vertebrae, a broken pelvis, and shattered legs. She also slipped into a coma for nearly a month and was temporarily paralysed from the waist down.

Yet she survived.

Even more remarkably, Vulović eventually regained the ability to walk. She later returned to work with the airline, though not as cabin crew. Over time, she became one of the world’s most famous aviation survivors, though friends and journalists often described her as uncomfortable with the attention.

Decades later, questions and conspiracy theories continued to surround the crash, with some journalists disputing the official explanation. However, no alternate theory was ever conclusively proven, and Guinness World Records still recognises Vulović’s survival as the highest fall survived without a parachute.

Vesna Vulović died in 2016 at the age of 66. But more than 50 years after the crash, her story remains one of the most extraordinary survival tales ever recorded.