The Backstory: Surviving a 35,000-foot free fall

Hearing about a panel on an Alaska Airlines jet popping off mid-air gives us all a serious case of the creeps. But imagine you’re in a jet at almost 35,000 feet when a terrorist’s bomb blows it into pieces. You free fall to Earth…and survive. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, we've been hearing about the Alaska Airlines jet
that had a whole side panel blow off the plane. Right. Well,
fortunately no one was sucked out with it. But imagine
falling from the sky when there's a terrorist attack at
thirty five thousand feet. I'm Patty Steele. How one woman
survived the biggest free fall in history. That's next on

(00:20):
the backstory. We're back with the backstory. The story of
an entire wall panel blowing out of an Alaska Airlines
jet recently kind of gives you the chills, right you
think about what it would be like to be sucked
out of the aircraft and literally fall through the sky. Actually,

(00:41):
you don't want to think about that. Well, it happened
to one woman and she survived. It was fifty two
years ago. It's January twenty sixth, nineteen seventy two. Vesnavolovich
is just twenty two years old. She's a flight attendant
on job Yugoslav Airlines and by the way, a huge
Beatles fan. Flight three sixty seven is headed from Sweden

(01:03):
to Denmark, then to Croatia and finally on to Serbia,
which is Vesna's home country. She's asked to head to Copenhagen, Denmark,
to help replace the crew that flew there from Sweden.
She is delighted. She's excited to visit Copenhagen and to
stay in a Sheridan hotel. How funny enough, she actually
wasn't supposed to be on the flight, but the person

(01:25):
doing the rotations for the flight attendants mistakenly put her
on the schedule instead of another woman also named Vesna.
So the DC nine takes off from Copenhagen with twenty
eight people on board, twenty three passengers and five crew members,
including three flight attendants, the captain and co pilot. It's
just after four pm, forty six minutes into the flight

(01:48):
and the jet is now over Czechoslovakia. Vesna is taking
care of passengers near the center of the jet. Suddenly
there's a massive explosion. Investigators later say they believe a
bomb had been placed in the baggage compartment by Croatian nationalists,
but no one was ever arrested. Anyway, the plane is
blown into three pieces. Now as the cabin depressurizes, the

(02:12):
passengers and other flight crew are sucked out of the
plane into freezing temperatures falling over thirty three thousand feet
to their deaths. So how did Vesna survive well? Investigators
say she was apparently trapped in a section of the plane,
probably pinned into the area by the drink's trolley, that
prevented her from being sucked out like the others. Next

(02:35):
the part of the plane she was in separated from
the rest of it and hurtled toward the ground. In
a heavily wooded area of the Czechoslovakian countryside. A crash
landed in thick snow on a slope at just the
perfect angle, and that's most likely what saved Vesna's life. Later,
her doctor said that her low blood pressure probably caused

(02:57):
her to quickly pass out when the cabin dean pressurized,
and that prevented her heart from bursting on impact. How
was she rescued well. Vesna was found screaming inside the wreckage,
with another crew member dead on top of her. Luckily,
the person who found her was a former World War
Two medic, so he was able to give her the

(03:18):
first aide she needed. Even before rescuers arrived, she was
in rough shape, though she fell into a coma for
a number of days, and she broke most of the
bones in her body. Her skull was fractured and she
had a cerebral hemorrhage. Three of her ribs were broken,
so were both legs, several vertebrae, as well as her pelvis,

(03:38):
and though she was paralyzed from the waist down, after
ten months she was able to walk again, but with
a bit of a limp. She attributed her recovery, she said,
to her Serbian stubbornness and a childhood diet that included chocolate, spinach,
and fish oil. Vesna said she had no memory of
the flight itself or the crash. She only remember boarding

(04:00):
the plane and seeing some women cleaning it, and then
waking up in the hospital. But she did remember before
boarding that one really grumpy passenger had checked his bag
for the connecting flight but never boarded the plane. She
believes that the bomb was placed inside his bag. Now amazingly,
she eventually returned to work for the airline. She actually

(04:23):
had no worries about flying after the crash, probably because
she didn't remember it. She wanted to go back to
work as a flight attendant, but JOT Airlines gave her
a desk job negotiating freight contracts because they thought her
presence on flights would kind of attract too much publicity.
Vesna became a celebrity in Serbia and was considered a

(04:44):
national hero that actually served her well. She was fired
from the airline in the early nineties after she became
a pro democracy activist and protested Serbia's vicious dictator. Fortunately,
she avoided arrest because the government was worried about getting
negative publicity by putting a national hero in prison. Eventually,

(05:05):
that government fell and she continued to campaign for a
democratic government. She told The New York Times, I'm like
a cat. I've had nine lives, but if nationalist forces
in this country prevail, my heart will burst. The politics
in this country are making me tired. My heart can't
take much more. I've had enough. In nineteen eighty five,

(05:27):
the Guinness Book of World Records recognized Vesna as the
world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a
parachute thirty three thousand, three hundred thirty feet or six
point three miles. She did get married at one point,
but all of the injuries and treatments led to some
complicated pregnancies, and she never had any children. She told

(05:50):
reporters she didn't think about her fall every day, but
she did admit she struggled with survivor's guilt. Vesna said,
whenever I think of the accident, I have a prevail,
grave feeling of guilt for surviving it, and I cry
sometimes and then I think maybe I shouldn't have survived
at all. She turned down therapy to help her deal

(06:10):
with her issues. Instead, she got interested in religion, becoming
a devout Orthodox Christian. After that, she said her ordeal
had turned her into an optimist. She said, if you
can survive what I survived, you can survive anything. But
she also got kind of reclusive and only occasionally granted interviews.
In fact, she turned down a lot of requests to chat,

(06:32):
including those from the BBC and notably Oprah Winfrey. Wow
that's kind of a difficult no, wouldn't you say, she says.
She just told them she was tired of discussing her
fall from the sky. Vesna Vulovich eventually died in twenty
sixteen from heart issues, possibly because she spent years as

(06:53):
a chainsmoker, which, by the way, she said led to
her divorce. She was sixty six years old, but she
is remembered as the ultimate survivor I'd like to thank

(07:14):
Will Kushner for suggesting this story in the aftermath of
the Alaska Airlines event. And if you have an idea
for a story you'd like me to take a deeper
dive into, feel free to reach out to me via
direct message on Instagram at Real Patty Steele or on
Facebook at Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a

(07:35):
production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and
Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser, our writer
Jay Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(07:57):
Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.