The death of a survivor is always a narrowing of the story’s living dimension. The crash itself claimed twenty-seven lives in January 1972; Vulović’s death in December 2016 meant the event no longer had any living eyewitnesses from among the people aboard the aircraft. The investigation, the accountability question, and the memory of the event are now entirely in the hands of people who were not on Flight 367: the investigators, the families, the documentary makers, the historians, the community near Srbská Kamenice, and whoever held the answer to who put the bomb on the aircraft at Copenhagen Airport on January 26, 1972.
What Vulović left behind is a documented life, a substantial body of interviews across decades, a Guinness World Record, a history of political activism, and a story that has outlasted the political system that first made her a symbol. Yugoslavia, the country that honored her and that employed her, does not exist. The Yugoslav Airlines that she flew for and then sat behind a desk for is gone. The Titoist socialist framework that incorporated her survival into its national mythology dissolved with the wars of Yugoslav succession. What survived all of that was the fact itself: a bomb, a fall, a woman in the wreckage, a villager who heard her screaming, and forty-four more years.
The record remains. The questions remain. The families still wait. And somewhere in an archive — in the files of Yugoslav state security that TV4’s journalists spent years accessing, or in other records that have not yet been examined — the more complete account of who decided to put a bomb on JAT Flight 367 may be waiting to be found.