The physics of the situation made survival impossible. A bomb detonated in the forward baggage compartment of a commercial jetliner cruising at approximately 10,160 meters — roughly 33,330 feet — above the border zone between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 operated by JAT Yugoslav Airlines, broke apart into three sections. Twenty-seven people died. They were sucked from the disintegrating fuselage into air that was approximately minus 40 degrees Celsius, moving at a speed that would have rendered consciousness impossible within seconds, and falling toward a forested mountain slope in the Bohemian hills. There was nothing about the circumstances that should have permitted a living human being to reach the ground.
One did. Vesna Vulović, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant from Belgrade, was found alive in the wreckage by a villager who heard her screaming. She had been pinned inside a section of the fuselage that came down on a heavily wooded slope covered in snow. She had a fractured skull, broken legs, three damaged vertebrae, a broken pelvis, and several broken ribs. She was in a coma when the rescuers arrived. She survived, walked again, and lived for another forty-four years — becoming both a Guinness World Record holder and, eventually, one of the most recognizable faces of opposition to authoritarian rule in 1990s Serbia.
This is the story of what happened to the flight, what happened to Vesna Vulović, and what she chose to do with the improbable decades that followed.
## The Airline and the Route: January 26, 1972