## The Anniversary: How the Story Has Been Remembered
Each successive anniversary of the crash has been an occasion for the story to re-enter public circulation. The pattern is characteristic of major disasters with surviving witnesses: the five-year anniversary, the ten-year, the twenty-five-year, the fifty-year — each of these became an occasion for retrospective coverage that sought out Vulović and asked her to revisit the event.
By the 1990s, when the political context of her later life became significant in a new way, the anniversary coverage had acquired an additional layer. She was no longer simply the survivor of the 1972 crash; she was also the public figure who had chosen to oppose Milošević. The two dimensions of her public identity — crash survivor and opposition activist — interacted in coverage that had to accommodate both.
The fiftieth anniversary of the crash in January 2022 generated a substantial amount of retrospective coverage, including the Guinness World Records piece from April 2022 that recapitulated the key facts of the survival and the 2022 anniversary pieces in various aviation and general interest publications. By 2022, Vulović had been dead for six years; the anniversary coverage was retrospective in a way it had not been during her lifetime.
The retrospective coverage of the crash has consistently had to navigate the same set of facts that any contemporaneous account faced: the disputed age, the uncertain coma duration, the unresolved question of perpetrators, the ambiguities of the survival mechanism. The handling of these uncertainties varies across publications and contexts. Some accounts flatten the ambiguities into confident statements; others acknowledge them honestly. The quality of the coverage tends to correlate with the care taken to engage with primary sources and the willingness to say “accounts vary” rather than choosing one figure and presenting it as settled.