The Czech Civil Aviation Authority reviewed the theory and dismissed it as media speculation rather than a credible challenge to the established findings. Critics of the shootdown theory pointed to multiple factors that undercut it: the debris field extended more than 1.5 kilometers, which one Czech military expert said was more consistent with a high-altitude breakup than a low-altitude one; if Czech military jets had been scrambled, West German air traffic radar would likely have detected them; and the flight’s black box data — analyzed by experts from three countries in Amsterdam — recorded altitude, speed, direction, acceleration, and timing data at the moment of the catastrophic event, providing direct instrumental evidence against a lower-altitude breakup scenario.
Vulović herself was clear about her view of the theory. She called it “nebulous nonsense.”
The Guinness World Records organization, after expressing initial concern about whether it had been misled, maintained her record after reviewing the evidence.
The shootdown theory remains in circulation in various forms — it is the kind of alternative narrative that tends to persist because it cannot be definitively disproven by the people most motivated to disprove it. The official records of the Czechoslovak military from the period have not been fully declassified, and the political conditions that surrounded the incident — Cold War Czechoslovakia, Soviet oversight, possible proximity of senior communist leadership — provide the atmospheric conditions for speculation. But the direct evidence available — the flight recorder data, the forensic analysis of the wreckage, the debris field analysis — supports the official conclusion, and independent experts who have examined that evidence have not found the shootdown theory persuasive.