An air stewardess who miraculously survived a plunge from 33,000 feet after her plane exploded in mid-air has died at the age of 66.
Vesna Vulovic was found dead by her friends in her apartment in Belgrade, according to Serbian state TV. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Vulovic was working as a flight attendant on January 26, 1972, when her Douglas DC-9 airliner blew up high above the mountain ranges of the former Czechoslovakia.
All 28 passengers and crew aboard perished, apart from Vulovic, who would enter the Guinness Book of Records for 'the highest fall survived without a parachute'.
It was suspected that a bomb was planted inside the jet during a scheduled stopover in Copenhagen, Denmark, but no arrests were ever made.
Trapped in the plane's tail cone, she plummeted to earth in sub-freezing temperatures and landed on a steep, heavily wooded slope near a village.
The fuselage tumbled through pine branches and into a thick coating of snow, softening the impact and cushioning its descent down the hill.
Vulovic was rescued by a woodsman who followed her screams in the dark forest.
She was rushed to a hospital, where she fell into a coma for ten days. She had a fractured skull, two crushed vertebrae and a broken pelvis, ribs and legs.
Initially paralyzed from the waist down, Vulovic eventually made a near-full recovery and even returned to work for the airline in a desk job.
She never regained memory of the accident or her rescue.
During an interview in 2008 that she could only recall greeting passengers before takeoff from the airport in Denmark and then waking up in the hospital with her mother at her side.
An instant national heroine, she went on to put her celebrity at the service of political causes, protesting against Slobodan Milosevic's rule in the 1990s and later campaigning for liberal forces in elections.
(culled from www.dailymail.co.uk)
No comments:
Post a Comment