In her final years, she had lived modestly, on the pension that was all her decades of work at JAT had produced after her early forced retirement. The 300 euros a month was a measure of what the political punishment of the 1990s had actually cost her in material terms. The woman who had received an award from a former Beatle at the Guinness World Records ceremony in London in 1985, who had been decorated by Tito, who had addressed crowds from Belgrade’s city hall — this woman ended her life in comparative financial difficulty, in a quiet apartment, found by locksmiths.
She was not bitter about it, at least not in the accounts she gave. She said the things she had done in opposition to Milošević were things she would do again. She said the crash had given her a perspective on what mattered that most people do not have. She said she was an optimist.
## What the Record Represents: Guinness and the Question of Measurement
The Guinness World Record that Vesna Vulović holds — highest fall survived without a parachute — is a document of human extremity that has attracted both genuine scientific interest and significant popular attention. It is worth examining exactly what the record does and does not claim.
The record is specific: the highest fall survived without a parachute, at 10,160 meters (33,330 feet). This figure represents the cruising altitude of the aircraft at the moment of the explosion — the altitude from which the aircraft began to fall after the bomb detonated. It is not the altitude from which a human body fell freely through open air; it is the altitude from which a section of an aircraft began its descent.