Vesna Vulovic, stewardess who survived 33,000ft fall, dies

Van Johnston

Van Johnston

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Van Johnston
Wow, never hard this story before.

"Vesna Vulovic, an air stewardess who survived the highest ever fall by a human being after her plane broke up at 33,000ft (10,000m), has died aged 66....

Vulovic was working on a Yugoslav Airlines Douglas DC-9 on 26 Jan 1972 when a suspected bomb brought the plane down among mountains in Czechoslovakia."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38427411
 
I remember reading about her in the Guinness Book of World Records when I was probably nine or 10.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I remember reading about her in the Guinness Book of World Records when I was probably nine or 10.
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Yeah, me too. IIRC, some tree branches absorbed some of the energy of her fall, then she hit a very steep, snow-covered hillside in a glancing impact. A truly amazing story.
 
SoCal RV Flyer said:
Yeah, me too. IIRC, some tree branches absorbed some of the energy of her fall, then she hit a very steep, snow-covered hillside in a glancing impact. A truly amazing story.
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They say it's not the fall but the sudden stop that will kill you. But for me, that 33,000 ft drop would have killed me in the first few hundred feet.
 
This story is not so straightforward. There is at least one seemingly reliable source that claims that she didn't fall out of great heights, but that her airliner was shot down low. There was a thread here about that with a link, when she died last year, which I'll try to find.
Edit: here is the link.
A spokesman for Guinness World Records told German paper Taz: "It seems that at the time Guinness was duped by this swindle just like the rest of the media."
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Highest fall without a parachute.
 
SoCal RV Flyer said:
Yeah, me too. IIRC, some tree branches absorbed some of the energy of her fall, then she hit a very steep, snow-covered hillside in a glancing impact. A truly amazing story.
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Snow and/or tree branches were involved in most of the recorded cases of surviving freefall from an airplane without a chute. Here are some others:
 
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