Forty-six minutes after leaving Copenhagen, at approximately 4:01 p.m., something went catastrophically wrong.
## Vesna Vulović: How She Came to Be on the Flight
Vesna Vulović was born on January 3, 1950, in Belgrade, then the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Her father was a businessman and her mother worked as a fitness instructor. She grew up in the postwar urban culture of Titoist Yugoslavia — a world that was, in various ways, more open to Western cultural influences than the Soviet bloc nations to the north and east, but still organized around the rhythms and constraints of a single-party socialist state.
She completed her early education in Belgrade and enrolled at university. Before finishing her first year, she went to England to improve her English — a practical and culturally distinctive decision that reflected Yugoslavia’s particular relationship with the West. Her parents, by her account, were not pleased and told her to return home.
The specific impulse that redirected her career came from what might be called a uniform. A friend’s flight attendant uniform caught her attention, and she decided, with the directness that would characterize the rest of her life’s decisions, that she wanted to do that job. She applied to JAT Yugoslav Airlines, Yugoslavia’s flag carrier.
She joined JAT in 1971. Flight attendant training in that era was rigorous by the standards of the profession — a combination of safety procedures, emergency protocols, customer service skills, and language training. She was twenty-one when she completed it and began flying routes across Europe.