THE life of Ms. Vulovic, whose parents were a company director and a gym instructor, changed irreversibly on Jan. 26, 1972, after she boarded Flight 367 in Copenhagen bound for Belgrade. She says she was not scheduled to fly that day and the airline had mixed her up with another stewardess named Vesna.

One hour into the flight, an explosion detached the cockpit from the main body of the aircraft. When rescuers found Ms. Vulovic  close to death because she had lost so much blood  she was still wearing her turquoise uniform. She says her legs were sticking out of the plane’s smoking fuselage on the snowy hill, with the three-inch stiletto heels torn off her shoes by the impact.

She was rescued by a villager, Bruno Honke, who had heard her screams amid the thuds of bodies hitting the ground. The cause of the explosion was never determined, but Yugoslav authorities at the time attributed it to a bomb placed in a suitcase by ideological descendants of an ultranationalist Croatian group known as the Ustasha. During World War II, the Nazis had occupied Yugoslavia and allowed the Ustasha, officially known as the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, to administer part of the occupied territory. The Ustasha were driven into exile or hiding after the war.

While Ms. Vulovic survived the fall, she did not escape unscathed. She spent the next three days in a coma with a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, two broken legs and a broken pelvis.

“I was broken, and the doctors put me back together again,” she said, lifting up the back of her chic suit jacket to show her twisted spine. “Nobody ever expected me to live this long.”

While she has no memory of the crash, she still recalls greeting passengers on the plane in Copenhagen and waking up in the hospital and seeing the stunned faces of her mother and father. The first thing she did after waking was to ask her doctor for a cigarette. Then, she said, she asked her mother for her cat and dog. “When I saw a newspaper and read what had happened, I nearly died from the shock,” she said.

Ms. Vulovic was paralyzed from the waist down, but was walking within 10 months  a feat she attributes to eating chocolate, spinach and fish oil as a child and to having the stubbornness of a Serb.