The Highest Fall
Marooned: Tales of the Catastrophically Lost
Aaron Habel & Jack Luna
4.9 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From the moment Vesna Vulović saw her friend wearing a flight attendant uniform she knew the job was for her. Vesna loved travelling to different countries and meeting new people. January 25th, 1972 was a day like any other for flight attendant Vesna Vulovic - she checked her schedule and boarded JAT Flight 367 to Belgrade with a layover in Copenhagen, Denmark. Unbeknownst to the crew and passengers, a mid-flight attack would rip the plane apart, and Vesna would be the sole survivor of the incident and a 33,333 ft fall.
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Sources:
"Too good to be true?" The Independent, Thu, Jan 26, 2012 ·Page 25
"woman survives 30,000ft fall" The Muskegon Chronicle, Fri, Jan 28, 1972 ·Page 1
"She's the luckiest girl alive" The Toronto Star Tue, Dec 26, 1972 ·Page 17
"Ex flight attendant survived 33,000-foot fall" Honolulu Star-Advertiser Sun, Dec 25, 2016 ·Page B6
"Stewardess survives plane crash" South Florida Sun Sentinel Sun, Dec 25, 2016 ·Page B4
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every single one of us, at one point or another, will become known for something. |
| 0:10.9 | You could be Joe the plumber or Anna the attorney, Diego the doctor, or May the marine biologist. |
| 0:17.7 | You can be the town drunk or the town crierrier or both. But what you can't be is |
| 0:23.6 | Vesna the flight attendant who holds the world record for the highest fall without a parachute. |
| 0:29.4 | Welcome to Marooned, harrowing tales of the catastrophically lost. I'm Jack Luna. This is Aaron Hable. |
| 0:37.2 | Vesna Vulevich was born January 3rd, 1950, in Belgrade, Serbia to a businessman father and fitness instructor mother. |
| 0:46.3 | Belgrade was the capital of Serbia, then the Socialist Republic of Serbia. |
| 0:51.3 | Vesna joined the Jat Company, which is Jet Airways, in 1971, after seeing how nice a friend of hers looked |
| 0:58.2 | wearing the outfit and learning that this very friend got to fly to London at least once a month. |
| 1:04.2 | Now Vesna, she loved the Beatles, and after completing her first year of university, she moved to |
| 1:09.5 | England to work on her English-language |
| 1:11.2 | skills. She had family friends in the West Berkshire Market Town of Newbury, but London is where |
| 1:16.4 | she wanted to be. After traveling to London, Vesna met a friend who suggested she gives Stockholm |
| 1:22.3 | Sweden a try. Now Vesna's parents relive at the idea of their daughter living in what they determined to be a sex and drug-fueled city and demanded she returned home to Belgrade, where she soon began her career with Jat. |
| 1:36.9 | Vesna, who was just 22 years old, had only been working at the airline for around nine months. |
| 1:42.6 | On January 25, 1972, the secondary crew of |
| 1:46.7 | Jet Flight 367 flew from Stockholm, Sweden, to Belgrade, with a layover in Copenhagen, Denmark, |
| 1:53.7 | and Zagreb, Croatia. Although Vesna was not actually scheduled to work on Flight 367, |
| 2:00.3 | she was excited at the unexpected opportunity |
| 2:02.2 | to visit Denmark for the first time. It would later be revealed that she and a girl of the |
| 2:07.1 | same name have been confused with one another, and their schedules have been switched by accident. |
| 2:13.0 | The aircraft was piloted by Captain Ludwig Razazzri and First Officer Ratko Meek. |
... |
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