## The Plane in the Snow: How the Crash Has Been Depicted
The story of JAT Flight 367 has attracted documentary and journalistic treatment across the decades since 1972. The way the crash has been depicted in various media — documentaries, television news segments, anniversary features, the 2024 TV4 investigation — reveals something about how aviation disasters and their survivors are incorporated into public culture.
The most consistent feature of the depictions is an emphasis on the dramatic visual of the aircraft breaking apart at altitude. This is understandable: the image of a commercial aircraft disintegrating 33,000 feet above the earth, sending twenty-eight people into free fall, is inherently cinematic. The problem is that it leads to depictions that sometimes blur the critical distinction between what happened to the twenty-seven people who died — who were expelled from the aircraft and fell without protection — and what happened to Vulović, who was contained within a section of the fuselage.
The depictions that represent her as falling freely through the sky — which she herself has noted and objected to in some forms — misrepresent the mechanism of her survival. They make the story more visually dramatic, but they also make it less accurate. They create the impression that she fell the same distance in the same manner as someone making a skydive without a parachute, when the reality is that she was inside wreckage, which is a fundamentally different physical situation.
She has generally been good-humored about the inaccuracies in how her story has been told, but she has also been clear when those inaccuracies were significant. The shootdown theory — which she called “nebulous nonsense” — was one area where she was not good-humored. The theory that she had not actually fallen from 33,330 feet was, from her perspective, not just factually wrong but insulting: it implied that her record was based on a false premise, and it implied that the official investigation she had lived through, and the medical and investigative record that she had spent years absorbing, was wrong.