Vesna fell 10,160 metres and went back to the office

Vesna Vulović fell 10,160 metres inside the tail of an aeroplane, survived, and ended up doing paperwork for the same airline. It was 26 January 1972: a bomb split JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight 367 in two over Srbská Kamenice, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Of the twenty-eight people on board, she was the only one who reached the ground alive.

Vulović, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant, was not even supposed to be there: the airline had mixed her up with another crew member also called Vesna, and she never corrected the mistake because she wanted to see Copenhagen. She fell wedged between a meal trolley and the floor of the rear fuselage, onto a steep, snow-covered slope that worked like a ramp.

She was found by Bruno Honke, a villager who had been a field medic in the Second World War, and he kept her alive until the doctors arrived. Twenty-seven days in a coma, a fractured skull, three crushed vertebrae, both legs and her pelvis. She was told she would never walk again, and she walked again, with a limp.

She also went back to JAT, which never let her set foot in a cabin again: they gave her a desk and freight contracts to negotiate, and there she stayed until 1990, when she was dismissed for demonstrating against Milošević.

She never remembered the fall. Guinness still credits her with the record for the highest fall survived without a parachute; in 2009 two Czech journalists argued that the plane was flying far lower than the file says, the official commission never amended the report, and the record stands where it was.