The airline’s stated reason — that her return to flight duties would generate excessive publicity that the airline did not need — is plausible enough on its face and probably represented at least part of the thinking. JAT was an airline with a significant international profile, operating in the complex political environment of Titoist Yugoslavia, and the ongoing association between its operational service and a catastrophic bombing that had killed twenty-seven people was not the brand environment its management wanted to perpetuate.
But the offered desk job was also a form of containment. Vulović’s survival had made her one of the most famous people in Yugoslavia. She had been decorated by President Tito, an honor that placed her within the political symbolism of the Yugoslav state. She was a national figure, and national figures, in the political culture of socialist Yugoslavia, existed in relationship to the institutions that acknowledged them.
She accepted the desk job. She spent her years after the crash working in JAT’s cargo division, negotiating freight contracts — a skilled job that required her professional expertise and her language skills, but that kept her on the ground and, in a sense, contained the inconvenient spectacle of the crash survivor continuing to demonstrate her willingness to fly.
She never fully stopped wanting to fly. In various interviews across her life, she made clear that the crash had not given her a fear of aircraft. She traveled by air regularly in her later years. The sky, for her, was not the site of her trauma; it was simply where she had been when the bomb went off.