A Serbian woman who survived what was said to be a 10,000-metre (33,000ft) fall after a plane exploded in mid-air in 1972 has died aged 66.
Vesna Vulović was found dead by her friends in her apartment in Belgrade, Serbian state television reported. The cause of death was not immediately known.
In January 1972 she was working as a flight attendant a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 plane when it blew up over the snowy mountain ranges of what was then Czechoslovakia. All of the other 27 passengers and crew on board died.
Trapped in the plane’s tail, Vulović plummeted to earth in sub-zero temperatures and landed on a steep, heavily wooded slope near a village. The fuselage tumbled through pine branches and into a thick coating of snow, softening the impact and cushioning its descent down the hill, crash investigators said at the time.
Vulović was rescued by a woodsman who followed her screams in the dark forest. She was rushed to hospital where she fell into a coma for 10 days. She had a fractured skull, two crushed vertebrae and a broken pelvis, ribs and legs. It was suspected that a bomb had been planted inside the jet during a stopover in Copenhagen. No arrests were ever made.
In 1985 Vulović entered the Guinness Book of Records for the highest fall survived without a parachute.
However, in 2009 two investigative journalists in Prague claimed the plane had probably been mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by the Czechoslovakian air force, causing it to fall and break up at a much lower height than previously believed.
Based on secret documents mainly from the Czech civil aviation authority, unearthed after more than a year of research, Peter Hornung and Pavel Theiner said they did not believe the aircraft had been blown up by Croatian nationalists as the Yugoslav government, backed by Czechoslovakian authorities, claimed.
“It is extremely probable that the aircraft was shot down by mistake by the Czechoslovak air force and in order to cover it up the secret police conceived the record plunge,” Hornung said.
Initially paralysed from the waist down, Vulović eventually made almost a full recovery and even returned to work for the airline in a desk job.
She never regained memory of the accident or her rescue. She said in 2008 that she could only recall greeting passengers before takeoff from the airport in Denmark, and then waking up in hospital with her mother at her side.
She went on to put her celebrity at the service of political causes, protesting against Slobodan Milošević’s rule in the 1990s and later campaigning for liberal forces in elections.
