Flight attendant fell from plane that exploded at an altitude of 10km and survived

A woman fell from a plane that exploded in mid-air at an altitude of 10km and survived without a parachute. She has lived another 44 years since the accident.

Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic has set a record for the highest fall without a parachute and still survived.

Yugoslav flight attendant Vesna Vulovic in 1972. Photo: AP.

Mrs. Vulovic fell from a plane that exploded in mid-air in 1972. She recently died at the age of 66.

Serbian television reported that some of Vulovic's friends found her dead in her apartment in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

In January 1972, while working as a flight attendant on a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9, the plane exploded in the snowy mountains of what was then Yugoslavia. All 27 passengers and crew members died in the explosion and crash.

Ms Vulovic was stuck in the tail of the plane and fell to the ground in temperatures near 0C, landing on a steep, wooded mountainside near a village.

Investigators said at the time that the plane's tail hit pine branches and landed on a thick layer of snow that helped cushion the impact with the ground.

A woodcutter heard Vulovic’s cries for help in the dark woods and came to her rescue. Vulovic was rushed to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for 10 days. She suffered a fractured skull, two crushed vertebrae, a broken pelvis, broken ribs, and a broken leg.

It was suspected at the time that the plane was bombed during transit in Copenhagen.

In 1985, Ms. Vulovic entered the Guinness Book of Records for the highest fall survived without a parachute.

Initially paralyzed from the waist down, she eventually made a near-complete recovery and even returned to work at the Yugoslav airline, this time in a desk job.

Vulovic never regained her memory of the crash and the rescue operation that followed. In 2008, Vulovic said she could only recall greeting passengers before take-off from the airport in Denmark and then waking up in hospital, with her mother at her bedside.

After the accident, Mrs. Vulovic became a heroine of the former Yugoslavia.

In 2009, two investigative journalists in Prague published research claiming that Ms. Vulovic's plane was shot down by a Yugoslav air force fighter jet that they mistook for an enemy plane./.

According to VOV