The fuselage section Vulović was in did not fall as a human body would fall. It fell as a large, irregular piece of aircraft debris — tumbling, rotating, decelerating in ways that depended on its aerodynamic properties, and potentially slowing its rate of descent relative to a simple terminal-velocity fall. It contained her inside it, protecting her from the direct atmospheric exposure. It came to rest in forested terrain covered in snow.
The intersection of these factors — the structural containment, the terrain, the snow, the specific angle and manner of the section’s impact — produced conditions that were survivable for someone whose body was in exactly the position and physical state that Vulović was in. Survivable barely, and with severe injury, but survivable.
The Guinness World Records recognized this as the highest fall survived without a parachute, recording her fall distance at 10,160 meters, or roughly 33,330 feet. The altitude represents the cruising altitude of the aircraft at the moment of the explosion, which is the highest point from which her descent began.
## Bruno Honke: The Man Who Found Her
The first person to reach Vesna Vulović in the wreckage was a local resident named Bruno Honke. He was a villager from the area near Srbská Kamenice, and he had served as a medic during the Second World War — a background that made him, by chance, the most useful person possible to reach the scene first.
Honke heard screaming in the wreckage. The sound was what directed him to her. She was alive, pinned within the fuselage section, trapped by a food service trolley — the kind of heavy metal cart used by flight attendants to deliver food and beverages to passengers during the flight. The cart had pinned her against the interior of the fuselage in a way that, contrary to its violent cause, may have been part of what kept her from being expelled from the aircraft during the breakup and fall.