Doctors found that she had a fractured skull, three crushed or broken vertebrae and two broken legs. The three-inch heels had been torn off her stilettos. She was temporarily paralysed and in a coma for a month. The first thing she did on coming round was to ask for a cigarette. “When I saw a newspaper and read what had happened,” she said, “I nearly died of shock.”

Her survival was not unprecedented. In 1944, for instance, Nicholas Alkemade had recovered from a fall of 18,000 ft in similar circumstances after jumping from his stricken Lancaster bomber. However, no-one had escaped from such a height. Paul McCartney presented her with an award from the Guinness Book of Records and Tito, the Yugoslav dictator, turned her into a national heroine.

Albeit with a twisted spine, she walked again and returned to work at JAT, taking a desk job. She did fly occasionally and, having no memory of the accident, had no fear about doing so. She even enjoyed watching films featuring air disasters. She was, however, very scared of cockroaches.

Vesna Vulović was born in Belgrade on January 3 1950. Her father was a businessman and her mother a fitness instructor. She joined the Yugolsav national airline after seeing a friend wearing its uniform.

She continued to work until 1990, when she lost her job for openly criticising the extreme nationalism of Serbia’s leader Slobodan Milošević. It was thought that only her fame saved her from arrest. In recent years she had spoken out against the renewed rise of the far Right in Serbia.

In 2009, several Prague-based journalists threw doubt on the official version of the accident. Claiming to have seen secret files about a cover-up, they stated that the airliner had in fact been shot down by a Czechoslovak MiG after being mistaken for a hostile aircraft.

Moreover, they said, the jet had broken up at a much lower altitude than given out and the story of Vulović’s fall had been cooked up to distract the media’s gaze. They admitted, however, that their evidence was only circumstantial, and it appeared to be contradicted by data from the black boxes independently analysed in Holland.

Latterly Vesna Vulović, who was divorced, lived alone in Belgrade with three cats. Her great consolation was her faith, which she had rediscovered after her ordeal. She ascribed her survival to Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, on the eve of whose feast she was saved.

“It made me an optimist,” she said of her experience. “If you can survive what I survived, you can survive anything.”

Vesna Vulović, born January 3 1950, died December 23 2016