The
Andes Flight Disaster
A
Plane Carrying 45 People Crashed and the Survivors Resorting to Cannibalism
before Being Rescued, 1972
The Andes
Flight Disaster: A Plane Carrying 45 People Crashed and the Survivors Resorting
to Cannibalism Before Being Rescued, 1972
The Andes
Flight Disaster: A Plane Carrying 45 People Crashed and the Survivors Resorting
to Cannibalism Before Being Rescued, 1972In 1972, a plane crashed into the
Andes and the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. This is the
story of the 16 survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was
chartered to take an amateur rugby team from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile, and
ended up in tragedy (and miracle).
The
accident and subsequent survival became known as the Andes flight disaster
(Tragedia de los Andes) and the Miracle of the Andes (Milagro de los Andes).
It
garnered international attention, especially after it was revealed that the
survivors had resorted to cannibalism.
1972
andes plane crash story photos
A Fairchild
FH-227D, with Flight 571’s Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya livery, used in the 1993 movie
Alive.
In 1972
the Old Christians Club chartered an Uruguayan Air Force plane to transport the
team from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile.
On
October 12 the twin-engined Fairchild turboprop left Carrasco International
Airport, carrying 5 crew members and 40 passengers. In addition to club
members, friends, family, and others were also on board, having been recruited
to help pay the cost of the plane.
Because
of poor weather in the mountains, they were forced to stay overnight in
Mendoza, Argentina, before departing at about 2:18 pm the following day.
Although
Santiago lay to the west of Mendoza, the plane was not built to fly higher than
approximately 22,500 feet (6,900 meters), so the pilots plotted a course south
to the Pass of Planchón, where the aircraft could safely clear the Andes.
1972
andes plane crash story photos
Last
photo of Uruguayan flight 571 before it crashed in the Andes.
Approximately
an hour after takeoff, the pilot notified air controllers that he was flying
over the pass, and shortly thereafter he radioed that he had reached Curicó,
Chile, some 110 miles (178 km) south of Santiago, and had turned north.
The
pilot, however, had misjudged the location of the aircraft, which was still in
the Andes. Unaware of the mistake, controllers cleared him to begin descending
in preparation for landing.
As the
aircraft descended, severe turbulence tossed the aircraft up and down. Nando
Parrado recalled hitting a downdraft, causing the plane to drop several hundred
feet and out of the clouds.
The rugby
players joked about the turbulence at first, until some passengers saw that the
aircraft was very close to the mountain. “That was probably the moment when the
pilots saw the black ridge rising dead ahead.”
Roberto
Canessa later said that he thought the pilot turned north too soon, and began
the descent to Santiago while the aircraft was still high in the Andes.
Then, “he
began to climb until the plane was nearly vertical and it began to stall and
shake.” The aircraft ground collision alarm sounded, alarming all of the
passengers.
Survivors
pose for a picture in the plane’s tail on November 26, 1972.
At
approximately 3:30 pm, the aircraft struck a mountain, losing its right wing
and then its left wing before crashing into a remote valley of Argentina near
the Chilean border.
A search
for the missing plane was launched, but it soon became clear that the last
reported location was incorrect. Rescue efforts shifted to the Andes, and the
survivors later reported spotting several planes.
However,
the snow-covered mountains made the detection of the white plane difficult.
Furthermore, the harsh environment led many to believe that there were no survivors.
After
eight days, the search was called off, though later rescue efforts were
undertaken by family members.
Survivors
pose for a picture in the plane’s tail on November 1972
The crash
initially killed 12 people, leaving 33 survivors, although many were seriously
or critically injured, with wounds including broken legs which had resulted
from the aircraft’s seats collapsing forward against the luggage partition and
the pilot’s cabin.
At an
altitude of approximately 11,500 feet (3,500 meters), the group faced snow and
freezing temperatures. While the plane’s fuselage was largely intact, it
provided limited protection from the harsh elements.
The
survivors had very little food: eight chocolate bars, a tin of mussels, three
small jars of jam, a tin of almonds, a few dates, candies, dried plums, and
several bottles of wine.
During
the days following the crash, they divided this into small amounts to make
their meager supply last as long as possible.
Rugby
players of Old Christians team from Uruguay stand near the F-227 plane’s
fuselage in December 1972.
Even with
this strict rationing, their food stock dwindled quickly. There was no natural
vegetation and there were no animals on either the glacier or the nearby
snow-covered mountain.
The food
ran out after a week, and the group tried to eat parts of the airplane, such as
the cotton inside the seats and the leather. They became sicker from eating
these.
Knowing
that rescue efforts had been called off and faced with starvation and death,
those still alive agreed that, should they die, the others might consume their
bodies to live. With no choice, the survivors ate the bodies of their dead
friends.
Survivors
rest on luggage on the plane fuselage in November 1972.
Survivor
Roberto Canessa described the decision to eat the pilots and their dead friends
and family members:
Our
common goal was to survive – but what we lacked was food. We had long since run
out of the meager pickings we’d found on the plane, and there was no vegetation
or animal life to be found.
After
just a few days, we were feeling the sensation of our own bodies consuming
themselves just to remain alive. Before long, we would become too weak to
recover from starvation.
We knew
the answer, but it was too terrible to contemplate. The bodies of our friends
and teammates, preserved outside in the snow and ice, contained vital,
life-giving protein that could help us survive. But could we do it?
For a
long time, we agonized. I went out in the snow and prayed to God for guidance. Without
His consent, I felt I would be violating the memory of my friends; that I would
be stealing their souls.
We
wondered whether we were going mad even to contemplate such a thing. Had we
turned into brute savages? Or was this the only sane thing to do? Truly, we
were pushing the limits of our fear.
The group
survived by collectively deciding to eat flesh from the bodies of their dead
comrades. This decision was not taken lightly, as most of the dead were
classmates, close friends, or relatives.
Canessa
used broken glass from the aircraft windshield as a cutting tool. He set the
example by swallowing the first matchstick-sized strip of frozen flesh.
Later on,
several others did the same. The next day, more survivors ate the meat offered
to them, but a few refused or could not keep it down.
Fuselage
of Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972.
In his
memoir, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home
(2006), Nando Parrado wrote about this decision:
At high
altitude, the body’s caloric needs are astronomical… we were starving in
earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious
that we searched anyway… again and again, we scoured the fuselage in search of
crumbs and morsels.
We tried
to eat strips of leather torn from pieces of luggage, though we knew that the
chemicals they’d been treated with would do us more harm than good.
We ripped
open seat cushions hoping to find straw, but found only inedible upholstery
foam… Again and again, I came to the same conclusion: unless we wanted to eat
the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing here but aluminum, plastic, ice,
and rock.
Fuselage
of Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972.
Parrado
protected the corpses of his sister and mother, and they were never eaten. They
dried the meat in the sun, which made it more palatable.
They were
initially so revolted by the experience that they could eat only skin, muscle,
and fat. When the supply of flesh was diminished, they also ate hearts, lungs,
and even brains.
Seventeen
days after the crash, near midnight on 29 October, an avalanche struck the
aircraft containing the survivors as they slept. It filled the fuselage and
killed eight people.
During
this time, several survivors, the “expeditionaries,” had been surveying the
area for an escape route. On December 12, with just 16 people still alive,
three expeditionaries set out for help, though one later returned to the
wreckage.
After a
difficult trek, the other two men finally came across three herdsmen in the
village of Los Maitenes, Chile, on December 20.
However,
the Chileans were on the opposite side of a river, the noise of which made it
hard to hear. The herdsmen indicated that they would return the following day.
Early the
next morning, the Chileans reappeared, and the two groups communicated by
writing notes on paper that they then wrapped around a rock and threw across
the water.
The
survivors’ initial note began, “I come from a plane that fell in the
mountains.” The authorities were notified, and on December 22 two helicopters
were sent to the wreckage.
That Wednesday afternoon, December 20, 1972, the rancher
Sergio Catalán Martínez rode his horse through the La Loma pasture, in the
lower El Durazno, a sector of the mountain range known as "El
Perejil", on the banks of the Azufre River, tributary of the Tinguiririca,
when suddenly he heard screams coming from the opposite bank of the river.
Two men he didn't know gesticulated and signed, but his voices
were distorted by the rough rush of the current. Later, Catalán recalled that
one of them knelt down imploring help. Despite the fact that they were on the
other side of the river, he observed that they were young and that they looked
“quite battered, ragged”, as he would say in some interviews. He yelled at them
that he would go see them the next day, that he had no problem coming back,
that they should try to sleep that night under the trees. Sergio Catalán, the
muleteer who met the Uruguayans
Catalan continued his march, but during the night he kept
thinking that there was something strange in the behavior of those individuals,
despite the fact that at first he imagined that they were guerrillas or a joke;
however, not just anyone could be in that sector, very far from civilization
and even less in the conditions in which they seemed to find themselves.
Chilean Catalan with Canessa and Parrado
The next day, around nine in the morning, he returned to the
place. There remained the young men, bearded, long-haired, badly dressed, who made
signs to him requesting help. Catalán took out a pencil and wrote the following
on paper:
"A man is going to come later to see him that I went to
tell him, answer me that he wants (Signed) Sergio C."
He approached the river and tying a pencil and paper with a
stone he threw it at the strangers. One of them wrote a note and then pencil
and paper flew back to the rancher.
Despite his basic training, Catalán understood from the first
moment that he was facing a formal request for help from those boys who were
twenty meters away. In his hands, tanned by the Andean cold and the constant
struggle with the reins of his horse, was that worn, folded, almost dirty piece
of paper that had been in his pockets for a long time, perhaps to write down
data on his cattle, but that now it contained the key to solving one of the
most enigmatic air accidents that occurred in that vast Andean sector. Little
by little he was reading: The paper that the Uruguayans threw at the
muleteer Sergio Catalán in which they asked for help
"I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am
Uruguayan. We have been walking for ten days. I have an injured friend
upstairs. There are 14 injured people left on the plane. We have to get out of
here quickly. We don't know how. We don't have food. We are Weak. When are they
going to pick us up? Please, we can't even walk. Where are we?
As soon as he finishes reading the note, he signals that he is
going to seek help and at a gallop on his horse he goes to his house in Los
Negros, in the Los Maitenes valley, where he arranges for his men to come to
help. and take them to that place. In the meantime, he heads to El Azufre,
where he crosses the international route, where he manages to get a truck to
take him to the Puente Negro police checkpoint, where he arrives at 1:30 p.m.
When the chief of the checkpoint found out the content of the
note and the story that that nervous muleteer was telling him about the
presence of strangers in his sector, the paper began to virtually burn his
hands and he immediately went by jeep to San Fernando, where the Mayor was
officially informed of the situation.
Meanwhile, a police patrol under the command of Captain
Leopoldo Vega Courbis began a rapid mounted movement to the place where the
survivors of the FAU-571 air tragedy were, who turned out to be Fernando
Parrado and Roberto Canessa, who had walked for ten days to that place to ask
for help for his comrades in the mountains.
In it, the muleteer Juan Farfán, accompanied by two mounted
men, had managed to help the faint walkers cross the Azufre River and had taken
them some twenty kilometers below, to the house of Catalán where they were
given the first food: milk in abundance, fresh bread and cheese, as well as a
hearty plate of beans that the hungry boys ate greedily.
In the last hours of the day, after 10:00 p.m., the
Carabineros patrol arrived at the place where the intern Vicente Espinoza, a
medical assistant from that institution, carried out the first examination,
visually auscultating both young people.
Roberto Canessa and Fernando Parrado
It is on that occasion, when the professional immediately
realizes the physical and moral integrity of the two characters, who, having
lost around twenty kilos of weight, should present a very deteriorated state of
mind, that is why questions about the way they fed during those hard seventy
days.
.
The
survivors slept a final night in the fuselage with the search and rescue party.
The second flight of helicopters arrived the following morning at daybreak.
They
carried the remaining survivors to hospitals in Santiago for evaluation. They
were treated for a variety of conditions, including altitude sickness,
dehydration, frostbite, broken bones, scurvy, and malnutrition. The last
remaining survivors were rescued on 23 December 1972, more than two months
after the crash.
Under
normal circumstances, the search and rescue team would have brought back the
remains of the dead for burial.
However,
given the circumstances, including that the bodies were in Argentina, the
Chilean rescuers left the bodies at the site until authorities could make the
necessary decisions. The Chilean military photographed the bodies and mapped
the area.
Survivors
of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571, photographed shortly after being reached by
rescuers, December 22, 1972.
Upon
being rescued, the survivors initially explained that they had eaten some
cheese and other food they had carried with them, and then local plants and
herbs.
They
planned to discuss the details of how they survived, including their
cannibalism, in private with their families. Rumors circulated in Montevideo
immediately after the rescue that the survivors had killed some of the others
for food.
On 23
December, news reports of cannibalism were published worldwide, except in
Uruguay.
On 26
December, two pictures taken by members of Cuerpo de Socorro Andino (Andean
Relief Corps) of a half-eaten human leg were printed on the front page of two
Chilean newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera de la Hora, who reported that
all survivors resorted to cannibalism.
The
survivors held a press conference on 28 December at Stella Maris College in
Montevideo, where they recounted the events of the past 72 days.
Alfredo
Delgado spoke for the survivors. He compared their actions to that of Jesus
Christ at the Last Supper, during which he gave his disciples the Eucharist.
The
survivors received public backlash initially, but after they explained the pact
the survivors had made to sacrifice their flesh if they died to help the others
survive, the outcry diminished and the families were more understanding.
A
Catholic priest heard the survivors’ confessions and told them that they were
not damned for cannibalism (eating human flesh), given the in extremis nature
of their survival situation.
The news
of their survival and the actions required to live drew worldwide attention and
grew into a media circus.
Return home from Santiago Chile
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NANDO PARRADO (LEFT) AND ROBERTO CANESSA (CENTER), FORMER
MEMBERS OF THE URUGUAYAN RUGBY TEAM WHO SURVIVED THE AIR CRASH OF FLIGHT 571,
ATTENDING A PRESS CONFERENCE AFTER THEIR EXPERIENCES WERE DOCUMENTED IN THE
BOOK 'ALIVE: THE STORY OF THE ANDES
Roberto Canessa
Fernando Parrado
View of
peak to the west that the three men climbed. The Crash Site Memorial in the
foreground was created after the survivors’ rescue.
The
ordeal was the basis for a number of books and films, including the best seller
Alive (1974) by Piers Paul Read, which was adapted for the big screen in 1993.
In addition, several survivors wrote books about the ordeal.
(Photo
credit: Wikimedia Commons / Britannica / Pinterest / nzherald.co.nz / NY Post /
Daily Mail UK / Flickr).
Updated
on: February 8, 2023
With affection,
Ruben
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