What is clear is that the device was loaded at Copenhagen — or brought aboard there — and that it detonated forty-six minutes later. The timing suggests a mechanism consistent with either a timed detonation or a pressure-sensitive trigger, though the specific trigger mechanism has not been established in the public accounts of the investigation.
The broader significance of Copenhagen as the point of loading is that it places the operational responsibility for the security failure at a Western European airport — not a Yugoslav airport, not a socialist-bloc airport, but an airport operating under the standards and practices of democratic Denmark in January 1972. This detail is occasionally noted in discussions of the case’s political dimensions: the bomb that destroyed a Yugoslav aircraft and killed twenty-seven people was loaded at an airport in a NATO country.
The airport security failures of the early 1970s that allowed events like JAT Flight 367 to occur were, in the years that followed, addressed through a series of reforms that changed how commercial aviation manages the risk of improvised explosive devices. Those reforms — screening requirements, baggage reconciliation procedures, the progressive development of detection technology — were driven in significant part by the accumulating evidence of what was possible when they were absent.
## Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Political Meaning of a Survivor
The government of Josip Broz Tito responded to Vesna Vulović’s survival with the full ceremonial repertoire of the Yugoslav socialist state. She was decorated personally by Tito — an honor that, in the political culture of Yugoslavia, had specific meaning beyond the individual recognition it conferred.