In Belgrade, at the age of 67, the former flight attendant Vesna Vulovic died, having survived a fall from a height of 10 thousand meters after a plane crash that occurred in January 1972 over German city Hermsdorf.
She did not answer calls from friends, which made them worried and asked the police to check her apartment. Law enforcement officers found the body of a former flight attendant on December 23 in the bathroom. Death came a few days ago.
Vesna Vulovic was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the person who survived the fall without a parachute from the highest height in history. All crew members and passengers, except Vesna, were killed in the plane crash. Rescuers found a 22-year-old flight attendant under the rubble. She received numerous injuries, but miraculously survived.
The 44-year-old plane crash that Vulovic survived is believed to have been due to the explosion of a bomb carried aboard the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 liner by Croatian Ustasha nationalists.
Vesna Vulovich became a flight attendant by accident. After graduating high school, she went to university. Enchanted, like many other young people of that generation, with the songs of the Beatles, Vesna chose the English department for herself and began to study English in order to understand her idols. After the first year, she went on an internship in England to improve the language. But after her return home, a meeting took place that drastically changed Vulovich's life. One of her schoolmates had by that time trained as a pilot and flew on the planes of the Yugoslav company JAT. It was he who advised Vesna to master the specialty of an international airline stewardess in order to visit her beloved London once a month. And the girl's finances required replenishment. In 1971, she took to the skies for the first time. By the time of the tragedy, she had not yet completed her studies and did not have a permanent job.
22-year-old Vesna Vulovic was not supposed to fly on this flight, but due to an airline error, she was sent to him instead of another flight attendant with the same name (Vesna Nikolic). On the day of the disaster, Vesna had not yet finished her studies and was in the carriage as an intern.
On January 25, 1972, the crew, in which Vulovich trained, arrived in Copenhagen, where he was supposed to change the pilots who had brought the plane from Stockholm. As Vulovich herself later recalled, she had the impression that her more experienced colleagues seemed to have a presentiment of something - they talked a lot about their families, bought them souvenirs ...
January 26, 1972 aircraft DC-9-32 Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (JAT, international name- Yugoslav Airlines) flew Stockholm - Copenhagen - Zagreb - Belgrade on the Copenhagen - Zagreb section. Onboard there were 28 people, including 5 crew members, including the stewardess Vesna Vulovic, and 23 passengers. Takeoff, climb and exit to the airway took place as usual. The flight took place at an altitude of about 10 thousand meters.
An hour after takeoff, the DC-9 passed the next waypoint: the Hermsdorf drive station in East Germany and reached an altitude of 10 160 meters. Soon the plane unexpectedly collapsed: the bow part with the cockpit separated from the main body. Debris fell near the village of Serbska Kamenice in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). In this case, large parts of the fuselage turned out to be no more than a kilometer from each other, while usually destruction by high altitude lead to significant scattering of fragments.
According to the official investigation, before the destruction in the air, the aircraft systems were operating normally, and the pilots were in their places. The examination did not find alcohol or drugs in the pilots' blood. No distress signals or breakdown messages were sent to the ground. The aircraft was relatively new: it began operating less than a year before the disaster.
An explosion in the luggage compartment at the front of the fuselage was named as the cause of the tragedy. 10 days after the disaster, Service state security Czechoslovakia presented fragments of an alarm clock that was identified as part of an explosive mechanism. Followers of the Croatian ultra-right organization Ustashi were suspected of organizing the attack. However, the crime remained officially unsolved, and the names of the terrorists have not been established ...
When the explosion occurred, Vesna Vulovich was working in the passenger compartment. She immediately lost consciousness, and subsequently could not remember what she was doing and where she was (in the middle of the fuselage or in the tail).
Of the 28 people on board, only the Serbian flight attendant survived. She fell without a parachute from a height of 10 160 meters and survived, which was recognized as a world record.
Local residents were at the site of the crash of the plane wreckage before the rescuers. They took apart the fragments and tried to find survivors. All crew members and passengers, except Vesna, were killed. Rescuers found a 22-year-old flight attendant under the rubble. The peasant Bruno Honke discovered Vesna, gave her first aid and gave her to the arriving doctors. Surprisingly, the girl miraculously survived after falling from such a height.
- Loud explosion, very bright light and unbearable cold - that's all I remember about that disaster,
- said Vesna Vulovich. - Stumbled upon me local, German Bruno, who served in the Wehrmacht during World War II. I felt my pulse, realized that my spine was broken, so I didn't move my body and immediately called for help.
Spring was in a coma and received many injuries: fractures of the base of the skull, three vertebrae, both legs and pelvis.
The girl was in a coma for 27 days; it took her 16 months to fully recover.
According to Vesna Vulovich herself, the first thing she asked when she regained consciousness was to smoke ...
She lost her memory every day - in the morning she forgot about what happened to her from the moment she stepped on board (her memory was restored after a few months, and the woman remembered the explosion only 25 years later). Doctors assured: Spring will never be able to walk. She was able - however, she studied for 4.5 years.
- I do not know how I was able to survive- said Vulovich. - Indeed, at such a height, a person dies almost instantly - the heart breaks from lack of air. Doctors speculate that my luck may be due to my low blood pressure. But why I didn't crash soft-boiled - no one can understand this at all. Only God saved me.
According to the recollections of Vesna Vulovich, she did not have a fear of flying, since she did not remember the moment of the disaster. Therefore, after recovering, the girl tried to return to work as a flight attendant in Yugoslav Airlines, but eventually got an office position at the airline, where she continued to work.
Having finally left the hospitals, where she spent more than one year, Vesna went to work - to recover as a flight attendant. Colleagues looked at her as if she were insane: to survive this and fearlessly get on the plane again? They categorically refused to take her on the flight, offering to quit her job and forget about aviation forever. But Vulovich insisted on her own: nothing particularly terrible happened, she loves flying and does not intend to cheat on him.
- But the officials did not heed my arguments - they gave an office job at the airline- complained Vesna. - It's a pity. I so wanted to go to the sky again! So since then I have only flown as a passenger.
In 1977 she got married (divorced in 1992). Have no children.
The miraculous salvation brought glory to Vesna Vulovich. The Guinness Book of Records in 1985, 13 years after the disaster, recognized her as the person who survived the fall without a parachute from the highest height in history. An interesting detail: when Spring arrived in London, Paul McCartney, the idol of her youth, received a similar document at the ceremony of presenting a certificate of entry into the Book of Records.
And in the Russian Guinness Book of Records in the first place - Larisa Savitskaya. In 1981, the plane in which she was returning from honeymoon trip, collided with a military bomber in the air. Within 8 minutes, the wreck of the plane on which Larisa was sitting fell from a height of 5200 meters. The girl landed on a birch grove. She received several fractures, lost almost all of her teeth, but was able to build herself a temporary shelter, in which she waited for help for two days. Savitskaya, by the way, is twice a record holder: as a survivor after falling from the maximum height and as receiving ... the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage - 75 rubles!
In the nineties, Vesna Vulovic became one of the prominent critics of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. In 2000 Vesna Vulovic actively participated in the events that led to his resignation.
Vesna Vulovic died in December 2016 at her home in Belgrade. On December 23, her body was found after the police opened the apartment, where friends of the woman turned, worried that she had not appeared on the street for several days and did not answer phone calls. The cause of death was not disclosed by the authorities.
Born on January 11, 1961 Larisa Savitskaya, a passenger who survived a plane crash and a fall from a height of more than 5000 meters
Private bussiness
Larisa Vladimirovna Savitskaya (55 years old) was born in Blagoveshchensk, Amur region. At the age of 20, Larisa and her husband Vladimir returned to hometown from a honeymoon trip to the sea.
They flew flight 811 on an An-24RV from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk.
On August 24, 1981, the An-24 aircraft, on which the Savitsky spouses flew, collided with a Tu-16 military bomber at an altitude of 5220 m. The disaster was caused by poor coordination between military and civil dispatchers. The An-24 crew did not report on the deviation from the main route, and the Tu-16 crew reported that they had reached an altitude of 5100 m 2 minutes before this actually happened.
The bomber destroyed the wing and the upper part of the fuselage, he himself cut the fuselage in the cockpit area with screws. After the collision, the crews of both aircraft were killed. Both planes fell into the taiga and caught fire. In this case, the remaining part passenger aircraft during the fall, it broke several times. The debris was scattered over an area of 5 × 1.5 kilometers.
At the time of the crash, Larisa Savitskaya was sleeping in a chair in the rear of the plane. I woke up from a strong blow and a searing cold - after the plane was depressurized, the temperature in it instantly dropped from +25 ° C to -30 ° C.
After another rupture of the fuselage, which occurred right in front of her chair, Larisa was thrown into the passage. She passed out. When I woke up, I realized that I was no longer sitting in a chair, but lying in the aisle between the chairs. And there is emptiness ahead.
Their row was the first on the edge of the fault. “It dawned on me that we were falling, and even managed to think that if I fell sideways like this, it would be very painful, that I had to group up ...”, Savitskaya later said. She managed to crawl to the next row, climbed into a chair, squeezed into it, clutching the armrests and resting her feet on the floor.
“Then, like a green explosion, larch trees caught my eye. In our taiga, larch trees are tall and tough. If you fall on them, only chips would remain. But here I was lucky again ... ". Her part of the plane glided into a birch grove, which softened the blow.
Savitskaya was unconscious for several hours. When she woke up, she saw in front of her a chair with the body of her dead husband. "Volodya sat with his hands on his knees and looked at me with a fixed gaze." The rain that had been pouring all this time had already washed the blood from his face.
Larisa received a number of serious injuries, but despite this she could move independently. When she was able to get up, she removed the white cape from the chair and covered her husband's face.
While waiting for the rescuers, Savitskaya built herself a temporary shelter from the wreckage of the plane. She warmed herself with seat covers, and flew from mosquitoes, hiding herself in a plastic bag. I drank water from puddles - it was raining all these days.
Larisa, as well as the bodies of her husband and two other passengers who died in that compartment, were found only two days later - the last of all the victims of the disaster. During this time, relatives have already ordered a coffin for her and even dug a grave.
Savitskaya was the only survivor of 38 people on board the An-24.
She was taken by helicopter to the nearest town of Zavitinsk, where the military airfield to which the deceased bomber was assigned was based, and was hospitalized. However, after only a day, they were discharged and sent home.
Savitskaya traveled to Blagoveshchensk, three hundred kilometers from Zavitinsk, in the back seat of a Zhiguli along the taiga roads.
At the Blagoveshchensk hospital, doctors diagnosed her with a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, and fractures of her arm and ribs. She also lost almost all of her teeth. The consequences of these injuries affect the entire subsequent life of Larisa Savitskaya.
A year after the disaster, she lay at home in a layer, "it was difficult to eat a bowl of soup."
Then she began to try to return to normal life. She graduated from the institute, having received a biology diploma, went to school as a teacher. However, I was able to hold out at school for less than a year and then I was looking for an easier job - as a laboratory assistant, an insurance agent.
In 1985, Savitskaya gave birth to a son, Gosha, without a husband. And two months after giving birth, her mother died in a car accident.
Larisa lived with her child on a single mother's allowance of 32 rubles. She reprinted texts, traded in books. After the restructuring, she organized a shoe sales company. Then she worked at the Borjomi office until she was paralyzed due to the consequences of a traumatic brain injury.
However, Savitskaya was able to recover from her paralysis. Now he works as an office manager in a real estate company.
What is famous for
An-24 passenger Larisa Savitskaya survived the plane crash and fell from a height of 5220 meters. She is listed in the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records as a survivor of a fall from a maximum height.
What you need to know
Larisa Savitskaya
Despite numerous injuries, Larisa Savitskaya did not receive a disability: according to Soviet standards, individually her injuries were not drawn to the group, and all together did not fall under any classification.
As compensation for physical damage, Svitskaya received only 75 rubles. According to the standards of the State Insurance in the USSR, 300 rubles were supposed. compensation for damage for the dead and 75 rubles. - for survivors of plane crashes.
In the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records, the history of Savitskaya is mentioned twice. The first time on page 129 as a record for falls from a height without a parachute, and the second - in the chapter "Man and Society" as a person who received the smallest compensation, incommensurate with the damage caused to health (concussion, two compression fractures of the spine, rib fracture, fracture of the wrist, numerous bruises and ruptures of muscle tissue).
Direct speech:
About the disaster:“The roar, the screams, the face burned with cold ... Then I found out that our plane immediately blew off the roof and cut off the wings, only because of this we did not explode - after all, there was gasoline in the wings. No, I didn't see the sky. There was a fog, like in a bathhouse. I didn't have time to get scared. Maybe because everything went like a continuation of a dream. She looked at Volodya - blood was gushing down his face. In the next instant, the plane broke ... ".
About salvation: “When the rescuers found me, they, except“ mu-mu ”, could not utter anything. I understand them. Three days to shoot pieces of bodies from trees, and then suddenly see a living person. Yes, and I still had that Vidocq. I was all the color of prunes with a silvery sheen - the paint from the fuselage turned out to be extremely sticky, my mother picked it out for a month later. And the hair from the wind turned into a large piece of glass wool. "
Rescue helicopter pilot about the crash: “I don’t understand, I don’t fit in my head ... Head-on collision of aircraft. How can you survive here? And to fall from a height of five versts! Can you imagine: a wall of dense taiga, hills sticking out, and this fragment lands exactly on a swampy meadow thirty meters in diameter? From above, it looked like a circle neatly drawn with a compass. Then I flew to that place again - not a single twig was broken there. It’s even scary: as if some hand carried her out of the catastrophe and carefully planted her ... ”.
3 facts about Larisa Savitskaya
- The wreck of the plane that Savitskaya was in was 3 meters wide and 4 meters long. His downfall-planning lasted 8 long minutes.
- Both the circumstances and the very fact of the An-24 plane crash in the USSR were not advertised. There were no press reports about them. The first publication about Savitskaya appeared only in 1985 - in "Soviet Sport", but the article said that the girl fell from a height of five kilometers during testing of an aircraft of the original design. “Apparently, they really wanted to write about it, but it was impossible to mention the plane crash. Then they figured out that I, a kind of Ikarushka, flew on a homemade aircraft and fell from five kilometers, but survived, because a Soviet person can do anything, ”says Savitskaya.
- Larisa Savitskaya believes that the film Miracles Still Happen helped her to survive in the plane crash: “Fate wished that Volodya and I watched an American film a year before. There the plane crashes into the jungle, and only one girl escapes, clinging tightly to the armrests of the chair. "
Materials about Larisa Savitskaya:
In some cases, passengers did not even receive any serious injuries. Some were simply late for the tragic flight, canceled the flight for whatever reason, while others remained relatively safe and sound after the crash. There were also cases when the victims of the disaster were those who were not present on the fatal side, but died under its wreckage.
4-year-old American woman who survived the crash
In August 1989, an American liner en route Saginaw - Detroit - Phoenix - Santa Ana took off from the airport in Detroit. A few minutes after the plane took off from the ground, it began to roll to the sides, crashed into several lamp posts and caught fire. The liner collapsed onto the road, drove along it, hit the railway embankment and crashed into the overpass. The plane was completely destroyed. In this disaster, one and a half hundred passengers and crew members were killed. On the ground, two people were killed in cars, which crashed the plane.
Cecilia Sechan, a four-year-old American woman, suffered significant injuries but survived the disaster. The child who survived the plane crash flew with his parents and older brother. The girl was noticed by firefighter John Tied, who worked at the crash site. Cecilia suffered a skull fracture, third-degree burns, collarbone and leg fracture. The girl underwent several operations, but was able to fully recover. Photos of the girl who survived the plane crash then flew all over America.
Cecilia Sechan was raised by her uncle and aunt. She has never been interviewed, but broke her silence in 2013 by starring in documentary"Sole survivor." The girl says that she is not afraid to fly on airplanes. She is guided by the principle: if it happened once, it will not happen again. In addition, the girl got a tattoo in the form of an airplane on her arm, which reminds her of that simultaneously tragic and happy day.
Larisa Savitskaya, survivor of the crash over Zavitinsk
In 1981, a Soviet student Larisa Savitskaya was returning from a honeymoon trip with her husband on the Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Blagoveshchensk flight, which was operated by the An-24 aircraft. The newlyweds had tickets in middle part aircraft, but since there were many empty seats in the cabin, they decided to take seats in the tail.
During the flight, the plane collided with a Tu-16K bomber. There were several reasons for this. These are the mistakes of the airport ground personnel, dispatchers, and the generally unsatisfactory organization of flights in the Zavitinsk area, and non-compliance with the requirements of safety rules, and unclear interaction between civil and military aircraft. Everyone on board both planes was killed, except for the only girl who survived the plane crash.
At the time of the collision of the planes, Larisa was sleeping in her chair. The girl woke up from a burn caused by the depressurization of the cabin, cold air (the temperature dropped to -30 degrees) and a strong blow. After the fuselage broke, the girl was thrown into the aisle, she lost consciousness, but after a few moments she woke up, got to the nearest chair and squeezed into it without wearing a seat belt. Larisa Savitskaya, a plane crash survivor, later claimed that at that moment she remembered the film Miracles Still Happen, the heroine of which miraculously escaped in the crash, squeezing into a chair. But the girl then did not think about salvation, she just wanted to "die does not hurt."
Part of the plane fell on a birch grove, which significantly softened the impact. Larissa fell on a wreck of 3 x 4 meters. It was subsequently determined that the fall took eight minutes. The girl fell to the ground unconscious.
When she woke up, she saw in front of her a chair with the body of her deceased husband. Larisa was injured, but could still move independently. The girl had to spend two days in the forest, alone, among the corpses and wreckage of the plane. The girl was in paint that flew from the fuselage, her hair was very tangled in the wind. She built a temporary shelter from the wreckage, warmed herself with seat covers, and sheltered herself from mosquitoes with plastic bags.
All this time it was raining, but search work was still carried out. Larissa waved a flying helicopter, but rescuers, not expecting to find survivors, mistook her for a geologist from a nearby camp. Larisa Savitskaya, as well as the bodies of her husband and two other passengers, were found last. She was the only survivor.
The doctors determined that the girl had a concussion, fractured ribs, arms, spinal injuries, in addition, she lost almost all of her teeth. Despite her injuries, she did not receive a disability. Later, Larisa was paralyzed, but she was able to recover. Larisa became a person who received the minimum amount of compensation, that is, only 75 rubles.
Serbian stewardess who survived a plane crash in 1972
Flight attendants who survived a plane crash are not uncommon. However, the only survivors are already a one in a million chance. Such a miracle happened to a flight attendant from Copenhagen to Zagreb. The plane exploded in the air over the village of Serbska in Czechoslovakia. The investigation named a bomb planted by Croatian terrorists as the cause of the crash.
When the explosives detonated, the plane exploded into several parts and began to fall. At that time in the middle compartment was the stewardess Vesna Vulovich, who replaced her colleague Vesna Nikolic. The luck of the girl who survived the plane crash was a soft fall and the fact that she was first discovered by a peasant who worked in a field hospital during the war years and knew how to provide first aid.
The girl, who was soon taken to the hospital, spent 27 days in a coma, then 16 months in a hospital bed. She had amnesia, the girl for some time forgot every day that passed. But she still survived. Doctors explained her miraculous rescue by low blood pressure. When a person is at a high altitude, his heart breaks from high pressure. But Spring, which always had very low pressure, was able to escape death in the air. She was also helped by the fact that the girl lost consciousness. But how the flight attendant managed to survive when hitting the ground, no one knows.
After the tragedy, the flight attendant who survived the plane crash quit her job and never flew on airplanes again. She admitted to reporters that even before that disaster she was on the verge of life and death eight times. It was when Vesna was vacationing in Montenegro and met with a shark that should not have been in those waters at all, when she argued with her mentally ill neighbor about politics (the man took a knife and tried to attack), when she had a severe case of ectopic pregnancy and etc.
9-year-old girl survivor of the disaster over Cartagena
In January 1995, an American plane flew from Bogota to Cartagena with 5 crew members and 47 passengers on board. During the landing approach, the altimeter refused, the plane crashed in a swampy area. Nine-year-old Erica Delgado flew with her parents and younger brother. The surviving girl after the plane crash said that her mother pushed her out of the falling plane.
The plane exploded and caught fire when it fell. Erica fell into the seaweed, which softened the fall. Looting began immediately after the tragedy. Residents of the nearest village tore off the gold necklace from the living girl, ignoring her requests for help. Some time later, the surviving girl after the plane crash was found by a farmer.
A dozen survivors and 72 days of fighting nature
In the fall of 1972, an aircraft crashed on its way from Montevideo to Santiago. The survivors had virtually no chance of escape, but they managed to cheat death. Several passengers remained in the snow-capped mountains, not knowing where they were or if anyone was looking for them. It was cold in the mountains, people tried to somehow get warm, hiding in the remnants of the fuselage. By morning, several passengers had not woken up. The passengers managed to find some provisions: crackers, liquor, a few chocolates, sardines. Everyone understood that this was not enough. The survivors later found a radio and heard that the rescue operation had been stopped. Then they decided to eat the dead.
The next day there was an avalanche, some of the people were under the snow blockages. It was possible to get out from under the rubble in three days. People were waiting for salvation for 72 days. Each new day of theirs was similar to the previous one. Soon, three survivors decided to go in search of some settlement... It was hard for them to breathe and move in the snow, soon one of the group decided to return back to the plane.
When they reached the top of the mountain, they saw only snow-capped mountains around. They thought that there was no more hope, but decided that it was better to die on the road than near the plane. Moreover, the mother and sister of one of the guys had died earlier, and he knew that if he returned, he would have to eat their meat.
On the ninth day of the journey, the young people found a river, on the other side they saw a shepherd. He brought a paper and a pen, threw it with a stone to the other side. The survivors wrote down everything that happened to them. The shepherd threw cheese and bread to the young guys, and he went to the nearest settlement, to which it was 10 hours to walk. He returned back with the military.
The rescue operation took two days. First, the military rescued two young people who went in search of a settlement. The survivors gave their first press conference back in the mountains. The young people had to tell everything that happened. But the press turned out to be ruthless, newspapers were full of headlines "They ate the dead", "Traces of cannibalism" and so on. But both the rescuers and the survivors themselves understood that they had no other opportunity to survive.
Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Juliana Dealer Kepke
The plane crash happened at night. When the girl woke up, the hands of her clock were running, the time was about nine in the morning. The surviving girl later said that her eyes and head ached very much. She was sitting in the same chair. Juliana passed out several times. The girl saw the rescue helicopters, but could not give any signal.
Seventeen-year-old Juliana broke her collarbone, she had a deep wound on her leg, scratches, her right eye was swollen from the blow, her whole body was covered with bruises. The girl found herself in a deep forest. Her father was a zoologist, as a child he taught Juliana the rules of survival, she was able to finish off food, and soon found a stream. Nine days later, Juliana Dealer Kepke herself went to the fishermen.
Based on history miraculous salvation Juliana made the feature film Miracles Still Happen, which later helped Larisa Savitskaya survive.
Survivor of the plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean
The survivors of the plane crash were usually able to fully recover from the tragedy. In 2009, a flight from Paris to the Comoros crashed into the Indian Ocean. Thirteen-year-old Bahia Bakari flew with her mother to her grandparents in the Comoros. The girl does not know exactly how she managed to survive, since at the time of the disaster she was asleep. The girl suffered fractures and multiple bruises from the fall. But she had to hold out even before the rescuers arrived. She climbed onto one of the wreckage that was floating. Bakari was found only fourteen hours after the disaster. The girl was taken to Paris on a special flight.
The Lucky Four in the worst-fatalized disaster
In 1985, Japan suffered the largest disaster in terms of the number of victims, involving one plane. The Boeing flew from Tokyo to Osaka. Onboard there were more than five hundred passengers and crew members. After takeoff, the tail stabilizer came off, depressurization occurred, the pressure dropped, and some of the airliner systems failed.
The plane was doomed, it became uncontrollable. The pilots managed to keep the liner in the air for more than half an hour. As a result, he crashed a hundred kilometers from the capital of Japan. The plane crashed in the mountains, rescuers were able to find the wreckage only the next morning, of course, they did not hope to find the survivors.
But a group of rescuers found a whole group of survivors. They were the flight attendant, passenger Hiroko Yoshizaki and her eight-year-old daughter, twelve-year-old Keiko Kawakami. The last girl was found in a tree. All four survivors were in the tail section of the aircraft, exactly where the liner skin was torn. But more passengers could have survived in the crash. Keiko Kawakami later claimed to have heard the voices of passengers, including her father. Many passengers died on the ground from their wounds and injuries. 520 people became victims of the tragedy.
Girl survivor of the L-410 plane crash
The surviving girl after the plane crash in Khabarovsk is three-year-old Jasmina Leontyeva. The girl flew with her teacher on the Khabarovsk - Nelkan route, the plane was supposed to land, but went to land, banked and fell near the runway. Two crew members and four passengers who were on board were killed. The girl, who was found under the wreckage of the plane, was immediately taken to the hospital, and then transported to Khabarovsk by a special plane. There, the parents of the surviving girl after the plane crash were already waiting for Jasmine in the hospital.
Flight technician who survived the Yak-42 crash
Several years ago, a Yak-42 plane crashed with the Lokomotiv hockey team on board. The flight engineer managed to survive in this terrible tragedy. The survivor of the plane crash (Lokomotiv) Alexander Sizov testified in court. The case of Vadim Timofeev, who was responsible for security at air transport at the Yak Service company.
Air transport is one of the safest, but tragedies happen there from time to time. Fortunately, even in a plane crash there is a chance of surviving, albeit one in a million. Evidence of this is the Soviet flight attendant, who survived the plane crash, the only survivor of the crash over Indian Ocean, the tragedy over Cartagena, the "Lucky Four" in Japan and other people.
Can you survive a plane crash? These are the questions that engineers, rescuers, even insurance workers ask themselves. But the most ordinary people who sometimes have to become passengers of airplanes often think about it. Survivor of the plane crash Larisa Savitskaya, quite possibly, also asked herself a similar question. But she could hardly have known that fate would provide her with the opportunity to respond to him with her own example.
Dry words of information
This incredible story took place on August 24, 1981. On board the usual AN-24, flying to Blagoveshchensk from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, there was a crew and passengers - only 38 people. In the passenger compartment, closer to the tail section, sat a young married couple: Larisa and Vladimir. Their wedding took place just a few months earlier. At an altitude of just over 5200 meters, the liner collided with a military aircraft.
We will not discuss now how and by whose fault the tragedy occurred - this is a separate topic for a big conversation. It is important for us that as a result of the impact, the passenger ship instantly lost its wings, fuel tanks and part of the fuselage. The remaining huge fragment flew to the ground, with large pieces falling off several times.
In such terrible disasters, no one survives. The wreckage of the plane fell into the forest and scattered hundreds of meters. Rescuers did not even appear at the crash site right away, as they believed that there was no chance of seeing the living. When they finally arrived, an ominous picture appeared: fragments of corpses hanging on tree branches, blood, bodies mixed with metal and seats ... Two days have passed since the plane crash.
And suddenly, among the broken birches, people saw a living woman! Wounded, covered in mud and blood, but alive and even walking on her own! It was Lyudmila Savitskaya.
Miracles still happen
Subsequently, the woman more than once and in detail talked about her incredible salvation. During the impact, she was thrown into the passage (the girl was asleep). Instantly my face burned with heat and frost: overboard it was - 30º, and something was burning nearby.
Looking around, Larisa realized: she is in one of the pieces of the fuselage. Nearby, strapped in an armchair, sat a bloody husband who showed no signs of life. The wreck of the plane with Larisa inside was rapidly flying to the ground.
And at that moment, the girl for some reason remembered footage from the film that she had watched recently. The film was titled "Miracles Still Happen," and it told the story of a flight attendant who survived a plane crash thanks to her clever seating position.
Without realizing a full account of herself, Larisa crawled to the chair, climbed into it, buckled up and curled up into a ball. Just like the heroine of the film did.
Later, the experts determined that the fuselage fragment with Larisa "on board" descended to the ground for about 8 minutes. Apparently, a certain role was played here by the fact that he probably planned a little, like a large sheet of iron. In addition, the "landing" fell on a young birch undergrowth.
Waking up, Larisa saw that she was still sitting in a chair, opposite her dead husband. She did not feel pain at all, although later it turned out that she was knocked out most of teeth, two ribs, one arm are broken, there is a serious contusion of the spine and a severe concussion. And the rescuers had to wait for a very long time: it seemed to her for an eternity.
Why did she survive
Experts of various profiles have studied the phenomenal case in detail. They came to the conclusion that a number of circumstances helped Larisa stay alive.
- The fuselage, as already mentioned, could not accelerate to high speed due to the gliding effect.
- The birch trees worked like a soft shock absorber.
- The girl did not panic, but did everything perfectly correctly, sitting compactly in an easy chair. In this a tremendous role was played by shots from the film, which she, in fact, recreated in reality.
- All the time, while Savitskaya was waiting for the rescuers, it was raining. He provided the girl's body with the necessary moisture.
Subsequently, the name of Svetlana Savitskaya was included in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of Records, and in two nominations at once: as a person who survived a free fall from a height of over 5 km, and as a person who received the minimum compensation after a plane crash - only 75 rubles!
Larisa Vladimirovna Savitskaya, after that terrible story, lived for many more years, gave birth to a son and died in 2013. Her example shows that miracles do happen, but they always accompany people who do not panic and fight to the last for their survival.
And if we talk about the world "achievement" in this nomination, then here the undisputed leader is the flight attendant from Yugoslavia Vesna Vulovic. The girl managed to stay alive after falling from a height of 10 km! But her injuries were much more serious than those of Larisa.
