In the case of Flight 367, the result was the breakup of the aircraft into three sections. East German air traffic controllers, who had been tracking the flight, were unable to raise it on radio as it passed from their jurisdiction. When they passed it to Czechoslovak air traffic control, radar contact had already been lost.
The aircraft came down near Srbská Kamenice — a village in the Děčín District of northern Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then part of Czechoslovakia. It came down in forested, mountainous terrain close to the East German border.
## What the Fall Was
To understand what Vesna Vulović survived, it is necessary to understand what the fall from 33,330 feet actually involved — and what it did not involve.
This is a critical distinction, noted in the original prompt specifications for this article: the survival was inside a section of wreckage, not in open air. She was not falling freely through the atmosphere. She was contained within a section of the broken fuselage — a portion of the aircraft’s body that maintained enough structural integrity to fall as a coherent object.
The difference matters physically and also in terms of understanding what made survival possible at all. A human body falling freely from approximately 10,000 meters would reach terminal velocity — roughly 200 kilometers per hour for a spread-eagled human — within about 60 seconds of free fall. At that velocity, the impact with any solid surface would be universally fatal. The body would also be exposed to temperatures that, at 10,000 meters, can reach approximately minus 40 to minus 60 degrees Celsius, depending on atmospheric conditions. Consciousness would be maintained for perhaps 30 seconds before hypoxia — oxygen deprivation at altitude — rendered the person unconscious.