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Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian air stewardess who miraculously survived a plunge from 33,000ft after her plane exploded in mid-air in 1972, has died aged 66.

Serbia's state TV said Ms Vulovic was found dead by her friends in her apartment in Belgrade. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Ms Vulovic was 22 and working as a Yugoslav Airlines hostess on January 26, 1972, when the Douglas DC-9 airliner she was aboard blew up high above the snowy mountain ranges of Czechoslovakia. All 27 other passengers and crew aboard died.

JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) Flight 367 left Stockholm bound for Belgrade. The flight plan included two stops – Copenhagen and Zagreb.

As the plane was flying over Hermsdorf in eastern Germany it suddenly disappeared from the radar screens and all communications ceased.

An explosion in the front cargo area broke the plane apart at an altitude of 33333ft causing it to spin out of control.

It was suspected that a bomb was planted inside the jet during a scheduled stopover in Copenhagen, Denmark, but no arrests were ever made.

The plane, broken into two main pieces, crashed against the slopes of a mountain in the Czech Republic with Vesna the only survivor.

Vesna had fallen through the sky for more than 10kilometres and it took her three minutes to hit the ground.

A German man Bruno Henke found her lying half outside a part of the plane with another crew member's body on top of her and a serving cart pinned against her spine.

Henke had been a doctor in the German Army during World War Two and he used his medical skills to help stabilise her until help arrived.

It was not thought that she would survive though. Her skull was fractured as were both her legs and she had three crushed vertebrae, a broken pelvis and ribs. But a few days later she awoke from her coma and asked for a cigarette.

It is believed she survived because she became trapped in the plane's tail cone and that stopped her being sucked out.

The fuselage then tumbled through pine branches and into a thick coating of snow, softening the impact and cushioning its descent down the hill.

Initially paralysed from the waist down Vesna eventually made a near-full recovery.

She continued to work for JAT and she even asked the company to let her fly again. However JAT refused and gave her a desk job at the airline HQ.

She never regained memory of the accident or her rescue. In an interview in 2008 she said she could only recall greeting passengers before take-off from the airport in Denmark and then waking up in the hospital with her mother at her side.

She became an instant national hero. Marshall Tito, Yugoslavia's ruler, gave her a welcoming reception, the highest honour you could get in the country at the time.

She had songs dedicated to her and was often a guest on prime-time TV shows.

Vesna became a fashionable name for babies as it was assumed it brought good luck.

The peak moment of her international fame came in 1985 when The Guinness Book of Records invited her to London.

She was awarded with the “highest fall survived without a parachute” record and Paul McCartney, Vesna’s idol as a youngster, gave her the prize.

She went on to use her celebrity status to help political causes, protesting against Slobodan Milošević's rule in the 1990s and later campaigning for liberal forces in elections.

Vesna always considered herself a survivor but no more than the rest of the Serb people.

Before her death she said: “We Serbians are true survivors. We survived communism, Tito, the war, poverty, NATO bombings, sanctions and Milošević. We only want a normal life. I just want a normal life”

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