She did not walk again until approximately ten months after the crash. The timeline of her walking recovery — from paralyzed below the waist in February 1972 to walking again around December 1972 — represents a rehabilitation achievement that her medical team might not have predicted in the early weeks. When she did walk, it was with a permanent limp. Her spine had been permanently altered by the damage to her vertebrae; she would walk for the rest of her life with the gait that the injury had given her.
Total recuperation — the point at which she considered herself recovered enough to return to something like ordinary life — took approximately sixteen months from the crash. By the fall of 1973 she was well enough to think about the future in practical terms.
## The Return to JAT: What She Wanted and What She Got
In September 1972 — roughly eight months after the crash — Vesna Vulović wanted to go back to work. She wanted to fly.
This desire, expressed by a woman who was still recovering from injuries that would have ended almost anyone else’s engagement with aviation permanently, reveals something specific about her character. She had chosen flight attendant work as a career deliberately, with the energy of someone who knew what she wanted. The crash did not transfer her desire for that career to some safer alternative. She wanted to return to the aircraft, to the job, to the routes she had been flying when the bomb went off.
JAT Yugoslav Airlines declined to let her fly.