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The incredible story of a woman who fell 33,000 feet and lived.
Vesna Vulovic in the hospital. Photo: yahoo.com
On January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant on JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367, flying from Stockholm to Belgrade, with stopovers.
The McDonnell Douglas DC-9, was cruising at about 33,000 feet over Czechoslovakia, when the plane exploded from a bomb placed in the luggage compartment.
27 of the 28 people onboard died.
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Vesna was in the tail section of the plane, which crashed in sub-freezing temperatures.
Her section landed on a snow-covered mountainside, and slid down a slope. A local man, an ex-military medic, provided Vesna with medical care until the authorities arrived.
Her survival was a miracle!
But at a price. Vesna had a fractured skull, broken ribs, broken legs, a broken pelvis, and crushed vertebra, and she was in a coma for 27 days, and for 16 months, she was hospitalized.
Paralyzed below the waste for several months, after years of rehabilitation, she was able to walk again, but with a limp.
While Vesna became globally famous for her miraculous survival, and showered with attention, she remembered nothing of the explosion or its aftermath.
She recalled greeting passengers, and then awakening in the hospital.
In her private life, Vesna was a divorcee without children. She passed away at the age of 66 on December 23, 2016.
However:
Vesna holds the Guinness World Record, for surviving by far the highest fall without a parachute, one of history's most remarkable survival cases.
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