Approximately two weeks after waking from the coma, a doctor told her what had happened. By one account, she fainted when shown a newspaper headline about the crash. The full grasp of what she had survived — and what had happened to her colleagues — came to her gradually, in pieces, delivered by other people who had to explain to her something that she had no experience of remembering.
## The Medical Explanation: What Doctors Said About Her Survival
The question of why Vesna Vulović survived is one that physicians and aviation experts have addressed, in various ways, across the five decades since the crash. The honest answer is that no complete causal explanation has been established as scientifically proven. What exists is a set of factors that investigators and physicians have identified as potentially contributing to an outcome that defied the odds.
The most consistently cited explanation is her blood pressure. Vulović reportedly had a history of low blood pressure — hypotension. The physicians who treated her after the crash offered a hypothesis: that at the moment of the aircraft’s decompression and breakup at altitude, her low blood pressure caused her to lose consciousness very quickly. The rapid loss of consciousness, in this account, may have kept her heart from bursting on impact — cardiac arrest from the physical shock of impact being a mechanism of death that full consciousness might have made more likely.
This explanation is attributed to her treating physicians and has been reported across multiple sources. It is a hypothesis, not a proven causal finding. The mechanisms it invokes — the relationship between baseline blood pressure, speed of consciousness loss under hypoxic conditions, and cardiac vulnerability to traumatic impact — are plausible based on what is understood about cardiovascular physiology. Whether they were specifically causal in her case cannot be determined from retrospective analysis.