In January 1972, JAT Yugoslav Airlines was the flag carrier of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — a country that occupied a peculiar and strategically significant position in the Cold War world. Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito was a communist state that had broken with the Soviet Union in 1948, refusing to join the Eastern Bloc and charting its own course as a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. This made it simultaneously more accessible to Western travelers than its Soviet-bloc neighbors and more suspicious to Eastern Bloc security services than a pure Western nation would have been.
JAT flew routes across Europe, operating the kinds of connections between socialist Yugoslavia and the Western capitals that were critical to the country’s unusual international standing. The airline’s fleet included McDonnell Douglas DC-9s, the American twin-engine narrow-body jet that had entered commercial service in 1965 and become a workhouse of short and medium-haul European aviation. The DC-9-32, the variant operated on this route, was a reliable aircraft with an established safety record.
Flight 367 on January 26, 1972, was scheduled to fly from Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport to Belgrade’s Surčin Airport, with stopovers in Copenhagen and Zagreb. It was a multi-leg journey that would take it through several countries and several air traffic control zones, traversing the complex airspace geography of Cold War Europe.
The aircraft departed Stockholm at 1:30 p.m. UTC. It landed in Copenhagen at approximately 2:30 p.m. and departed again at 3:15 p.m., bound for Zagreb. The next scheduled stop was more than two hours ahead.