Cannibalism: Survivor of the 1972 Andes plane crash describes their experience
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was a chartered flight carrying 45 people, including a rugby union team, their friends, family and associates, that crashed in the Andes on 13 October 1972, in an incident known as the Andes flight disaster and, in the Hispanic world and South America, as the Miracle of the Andes (El Milagro de los Andes). More than a quarter of the passengers died in the crash and several others quickly succumbed to cold and injury. Of the 27 who were alive a few days after the accident, another eight were killed by an avalanche that swept over their shelter in the wreckage. The last 16 survivors were rescued on 23 December 1972, more than two months after the crash.
The survivors had little food and no source of heat in the harsh conditions at over 3,600 metres (11,800 ft) altitude. Faced with starvation and radio news reports that the search for them had been abandoned, the survivors fed on the bodies of dead passengers that had been preserved in the snow. Rescuers did not learn of the survivors until 72 days after the crash when passengers Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, after a 10-day trek across the Andes, found Chilean arriero Sergio Catalán, who gave them food and then alerted the authorities to the existence of the other survivors.
They took off at Carrasco International Airport, Montevideo and were heading to Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport, Santiago.
The pilot then notice that the plane may not be able to fly high enough across a high mountain so he decided to take a very long journey due south to enable him avoid the mountain, when he got to a point where he believed the mountain is not that high, he decided to turn the place west-ward to move across the mountain, before heading back due north which is their original destination...
but the journey across the mountain should take him about 11 minutes but he miss-calculated the distance and turn the plane north-ward just at the middle of the mountain, and that changed the fate of the whole passengers.
It was too late before he could realize he made a terrible mistake, he tried to fly the plane higher but the tail hits the cliff and then.... crashed into the valley...
They spent about 3 months at the crash scene with no food, water or anything whatsoever untill they were foreced to eat the bodies of their friends who are already dead... that was pathetic.
Though, they looked for them but they could not be reached due to the remote(ness) of the crash location.
The survivors of the crash found a small transistor radio on the aircraft and Roy Harley first heard the news that the search for them was cancelled after days of search.
On 13 October 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force twin turboprop Fairchild FH-227D was flying over the Andes carrying the Old Christians Club rugby union team from Montevideo, Uruguay, to play a match in Santiago, Chile. The trip had begun the day before when the Fairchild departed from Carrasco International Airport, but inclement mountain weather forced an overnight stop in Mendoza, Argentina. At the Fairchild's ceiling of 9,000 metres (30,000 ft), the aircraft could not fly directly from Mendoza, over the Andes, to Santiago, in large part because of the weather. Instead, the pilots had to fly south from Mendoza parallel to the Andes, then turn west towards the mountains, fly through a low pass (Planchon), cross the mountains and emerge on the Chilean side of the Andes south of Curicó before finally turning north and initiating descent into Santiago.
Dipping into the cloud cover while still over the mountains, the Fairchild soon crashed on an unnamed peak (later called Cerro Seler, also known as Glaciar de las Lágrimas or Glacier of Tears), between Cerro Sosneado and Volcán Tinguiririca, straddling the remote mountainous border between Chile and Argentina. The aircraft clipped the peak at 4,200 metres (13,800 ft), severing the right wing, which was thrown back with such force that it cut off the vertical stabilizer, leaving a gaping hole in the rear of the fuselage. The aircraft then clipped a second peak which severed the left wing and left the aircraft as just a fuselage flying through the air. One of the propellers sliced through the fuselage as the wing it was attached to was severed. The fuselage hit the ground and slid down a steep mountain slope before finally coming to rest in a snow bank. The location of the crash site is 34°45′54″S 70°17′11″W, in the Argentine municipality of Malargüe (Malargüe Department, Mendoza Province).
Early days
Of the 45 people on the aircraft, 12 died in the crash or shortly thereafter; another 5 died by the next morning; and 1 more succumbed to injuries on the eighth day. The remaining 27 faced severe difficulties in surviving in the freezing mountains at such a high altitude. Many had suffered injuries from the crash, including broken legs from the aircraft's seats piling together.The survivors lacked equipment such as cold-weather clothing and footwear suitable for the area, mountaineering goggles to prevent snow blindness (although one of the eventual survivors, 24-year-old Adolfo "Fito" Strauch, devised a couple of sunglasses by using the sun visors in the pilot's cabin which helped protect their eyes from the sun). They lacked any kind of medical supplies, and the death of Dr. Francisco Nicola left a first and a second year medical student who had survived the crash in charge to improvise splints and braces with salvaged parts of what remained of the aircraft.
All of the passengers were Roman Catholic. According to Read, some rationalized the act of necrotic cannibalism as equivalent to the ritual of Holy Communion, or justified it according to a Bible verse (no man hath greater love than this: that he lay down his life for his friends). Others initially had reservations, though after realizing that it was their only means of staying alive, changed their minds a few days later. There are reports that the only surviving female passenger, Liliana, although not seriously injured in the crash, was the last survivor to initially refuse eating the human flesh due to her strong religious convictions. She later began eating after being convinced by her husband, Javier, and the other survivors – though she died shortly thereafter in the avalanche.
Survivors
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Died in fall from aircraft
Died in crash or soon after
Died during first night
|
Died on second day
Died on eighth day
Died in avalanche
Died later
|
The survivors had a small amount of food: a few chocolate bars, assorted snacks and several bottles of wine. During the days following the crash, they divided up this food in very small amounts to make their meager supply last as long as possible. Fito Strauch devised a way to obtain water by using metal from the seats and placing snow on it. The snow melted in the sun and dripped into empty wine bottles. Even with this strict rationing, their food stock dwindled quickly. There was no natural vegetation or animals on the snow-covered mountain.
The group survived by collectively making a decision to eat flesh from the bodies of their dead comrades. This decision was not taken lightly, as most of the deceased were classmates or close friends. In his 2006 book, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado comments on 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. | ” |
Eight of the initial survivors died on the afternoon of 29 October when an avalanche cascaded down on them as they slept in the fuselage. For three days they survived in an appallingly confined space since the aircraft was buried under several feet of snow. Nando Parrado was able to poke a hole in the roof of the fuselage with a metal pole, providing ventilation. Among the dead was Liliana Methol, wife of survivor Javier Methol. She had been the last surviving female passenger.
Before the avalanche, a few of the survivors became insistent that their only way of survival would be to climb over the mountains themselves and search for help. Because of the co-pilot's assertion that the aircraft had passed Curicó (which was completely wrong, the real position was more than 55 miles (89 km) to the east deep in the Andes), the group assumed that the Chilean countryside was just a few miles away to the west. The aircraft had crashed inside Argentina, and unknown to the survivors there was an abandoned hotel named the Hotel Termas Sosneado just 18 miles (29 km) east of them. Although the hotel had been closed since 1953, and the building was in ruins, there is a hot spring there, and the walls that remained standing might have provided some shelter. On the other hand, there were no supplies at the hotel, and the trek would have taken 1–2 days, perhaps exhausting the survivors even further. Several brief expeditions were made in the immediate vicinity of the aircraft in the first few weeks after the crash, but they found that a combination of altitude sickness, dehydration, snow blindness, malnourishment and the extreme cold of the nights made climbing any significant distance an impossible task.
Therefore, it was decided that a group would be chosen, and then allocated the most rations of food and the warmest of clothes, and spared the daily manual labour around the crash site that was essential for the group's survival, so that they might build their strength. Although several survivors were determined to be on the expedition team no matter what, including Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, one of the two medical students, others were less willing or unsure of their ability to withstand such a physically exhausting ordeal. Numa Turcatti and Antonio Vizintin were chosen to accompany Canessa and Parrado. At Canessa's urging, they waited nearly seven days, to allow for the arrival of summer, and with it higher temperatures.
Although they were hoping to get to Chile, a large mountain lay due west of the crash site, blocking any effort they made to walk in that direction. Therefore, they initially headed east, hoping that at some point the valley that they were in would make a U-turn and allow them to start walking west. After several hours of walking east, the trio unexpectedly found the tail section of the aircraft, which was still largely intact. Within and surrounding the tail were numerous suitcases belonging to the passengers, containing cigarettes, candy, clean clothing and even some comic books. The group decided to camp that night inside the tail section, and continue east the next morning. However, on the second night of the expedition, which was their first night sleeping outside exposed to the elements, the group nearly froze to death. After some debate the next morning, they decided that it would be wiser to return to the tail, remove the aircraft's batteries and bring them back to the fuselage so that they might power up the radio and make an SOS call to Santiago for help.
Upon returning to the tail, the trio found that the batteries were too heavy to take back to the fuselage, which lay uphill from the tail section. They decided instead that it would be more effective to return to the fuselage and disconnect the radio system from the aircraft's electrical mainframe, take it back to the tail and connect it to the batteries. One of the other team members, Roy Harley, was an amateur electronics enthusiast, and they recruited his help in the endeavour. Unknown to any of the team members, the aircraft's electrical system used alternating current while the batteries in the tail produced direct current, making the plan futile from the beginning. After several days of trying to make the radio work, they gave up and returned to the fuselage with the knowledge that they would have to climb out of the mountains if they were to have any hope of being rescued.
It was now apparent that the only way out was to climb over the mountains to the west. They also realized that unless they found a way to survive the freezing temperature of the nights, a trek was impossible. It was at this point that the idea for a sleeping bag was raised.
In his book, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado would comment 34 years later upon the making of the sleeping bag:
| “ | The second challenge would be to protect ourselves from exposure, especially after sundown. At this time of year we could expect daytime temperatures well above freezing, but the nights were still cold enough to kill us, and we knew now that we couldn't expect to find shelter on the open slopes. We needed a way to survive the long nights without freezing, and the quilted batts of insulation we'd taken from the tail section gave us our solution ... as we brainstormed about the trip, we realized we could sew the patches together to create a large warm quilt. Then we realized that by folding the quilt in half and stitching the seams together, we could create an insulated sleeping bag large enough for all three expeditionaries to sleep in. With the warmth of three bodies trapped by the insulating cloth, we might be able to weather the coldest nights.
Carlitos [Páez] took on the challenge. His mother had taught him to sew when he was a boy, and with the needles and thread from the sewing kit found in his mother's cosmetic case, he began to work ... to speed the progress, Carlitos taught others to sew, and we all took our turns ... Coche [Inciarte], Gustavo [Zerbino], and Fito [Strauch] turned out to be our best and fastest tailors.[4]
| ” |
Of the 45 people on the aircraft, 12 died in the crash or shortly thereafter; another 5 died by the next morning; and 1 more succumbed to injuries on the eighth day. The remaining 27 faced severe difficulties in surviving in the freezing mountains at such a high altitude. Many had suffered injuries from the crash, including broken legs from the aircraft's seats piling together.The survivors lacked equipment such as cold-weather clothing and footwear suitable for the area, mountaineering goggles to prevent snow blindness (although one of the eventual survivors, 24-year-old Adolfo "Fito" Strauch, devised a couple of sunglasses by using the sun visors in the pilot's cabin which helped protect their eyes from the sun). They lacked any kind of medical supplies, and the death of Dr. Francisco Nicola left a first and a second year medical student who had survived the crash in charge to improvise splints and braces with salvaged parts of what remained of the aircraft.
Search parties from three countries looked for the missing aircraft. Since the aircraft was white, it blended in with the snow, making it invisible from the sky. At one point, the survivors tried to use several sticks of lipstick recovered from the luggage to write an SOS on the roof of the aircraft but abandoned the effort after it became apparent that they lacked the necessary lipstick to make letters that would be plainly recognizable from the air. The initial search was cancelled after eight days. The survivors of the crash found a small transistor radio on the aircraft and Roy Harley first heard the news that the search was cancelled on their 11th day on the mountain. Piers Paul Read's Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (a text based upon interviews with the survivors) described the moments after this discovery:
The survivors had a small amount of food: a few chocolate bars, assorted snacks and several bottles of wine. During the days following the crash, they divided up this food in very small amounts to make their meager supply last as long as possible. Fito Strauch devised a way to obtain water by using metal from the seats and placing snow on it. The snow melted in the sun and dripped into empty wine bottles. Even with this strict rationing, their food stock dwindled quickly. There was no natural vegetation or animals on the snow-covered mountain.
The group survived by collectively making a decision to eat flesh from the bodies of their dead comrades. This decision was not taken lightly, as most of the deceased were classmates or close friends. In his 2006 book, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado comments on this decision:
All of the passengers were Roman Catholic. According to Read, some rationalized the act of necrotic cannibalism as equivalent to the ritual of Holy Communion, or justified it according to a Bible verse (no man hath greater love than this: that he lay down his life for his friends). Others initially had reservations, though after realizing that it was their only means of staying alive, changed their minds a few days later. There are reports that the only surviving female passenger, Liliana, although not seriously injured in the crash, was the last survivor to initially refuse eating the human flesh due to her strong religious convictions. She later began eating after being convinced by her husband, Javier, and the other survivors – though she died shortly thereafter in the avalanche.
Eight of the initial survivors died on the afternoon of 29 October when an avalanche cascaded down on them as they slept in the fuselage. For three days they survived in an appallingly confined space since the aircraft was buried under several feet of snow. Nando Parrado was able to poke a hole in the roof of the fuselage with a metal pole, providing ventilation. Among the dead was Liliana Methol, wife of survivor Javier Methol. She had been the last surviving female passenger.
Before the avalanche, a few of the survivors became insistent that their only way of survival would be to climb over the mountains themselves and search for help. Because of the co-pilot's assertion that the aircraft had passed Curicó (which was completely wrong, the real position was more than 55 miles (89 km) to the east deep in the Andes), the group assumed that the Chilean countryside was just a few miles away to the west. The aircraft had crashed inside Argentina, and unknown to the survivors there was an abandoned hotel named the Hotel Termas Sosneado just 18 miles (29 km) east of them. Although the hotel had been closed since 1953, and the building was in ruins, there is a hot spring there, and the walls that remained standing might have provided some shelter. On the other hand, there were no supplies at the hotel, and the trek would have taken 1–2 days, perhaps exhausting the survivors even further. Several brief expeditions were made in the immediate vicinity of the aircraft in the first few weeks after the crash, but they found that a combination of altitude sickness, dehydration, snow blindness, malnourishment and the extreme cold of the nights made climbing any significant distance an impossible task.
Therefore, it was decided that a group would be chosen, and then allocated the most rations of food and the warmest of clothes, and spared the daily manual labour around the crash site that was essential for the group's survival, so that they might build their strength. Although several survivors were determined to be on the expedition team no matter what, including Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, one of the two medical students, others were less willing or unsure of their ability to withstand such a physically exhausting ordeal. Numa Turcatti and Antonio Vizintin were chosen to accompany Canessa and Parrado. At Canessa's urging, they waited nearly seven days, to allow for the arrival of summer, and with it higher temperatures.
Although they were hoping to get to Chile, a large mountain lay due west of the crash site, blocking any effort they made to walk in that direction. Therefore, they initially headed east, hoping that at some point the valley that they were in would make a U-turn and allow them to start walking west. After several hours of walking east, the trio unexpectedly found the tail section of the aircraft, which was still largely intact. Within and surrounding the tail were numerous suitcases belonging to the passengers, containing cigarettes, candy, clean clothing and even some comic books. The group decided to camp that night inside the tail section, and continue east the next morning. However, on the second night of the expedition, which was their first night sleeping outside exposed to the elements, the group nearly froze to death. After some debate the next morning, they decided that it would be wiser to return to the tail, remove the aircraft's batteries and bring them back to the fuselage so that they might power up the radio and make an SOS call to Santiago for help.
Upon returning to the tail, the trio found that the batteries were too heavy to take back to the fuselage, which lay uphill from the tail section. They decided instead that it would be more effective to return to the fuselage and disconnect the radio system from the aircraft's electrical mainframe, take it back to the tail and connect it to the batteries. One of the other team members, Roy Harley, was an amateur electronics enthusiast, and they recruited his help in the endeavour. Unknown to any of the team members, the aircraft's electrical system used alternating current while the batteries in the tail produced direct current, making the plan futile from the beginning. After several days of trying to make the radio work, they gave up and returned to the fuselage with the knowledge that they would have to climb out of the mountains if they were to have any hope of being rescued.
It was now apparent that the only way out was to climb over the mountains to the west. They also realized that unless they found a way to survive the freezing temperature of the nights, a trek was impossible. It was at this point that the idea for a sleeping bag was raised.
In his book, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado would comment 34 years later upon the making of the sleeping bag:
After the sleeping bag was completed and Numa Turcatti died from an illness, the hesitant Canessa was finally persuaded to set out, and the three men took to the mountain on 12 December.
On 12 December 1972, two months after the crash, Parrado, Canessa and Vizintín began their trek up the mountain. Parrado took the lead, and often had to be called to slow down, though the thin oxygen made it difficult for all of them. It was still bitterly cold but the sleeping bag allowed them to live through the nights. In the film Stranded, Canessa called the first night during the ascent, when they had difficulty finding a place to use the sleeping bag, the worst night of his life.
On the third day of the trek, Parrado reached the top of the mountain before the other two. Stretched before him as far as the eye could see were more mountains. In fact, he had just climbed one of the mountains (as high as 4,650 metres (15,260 ft)) which forms the border between Argentina and Chile, meaning that they were still tens of kilometres from the green valleys of Chile. After spying a small "Y" in the distance, he gauged that a way out of the mountains must lie beyond, and refused to give up hope. When Parrado and Canessa realized that the hike was going to take more time than they had originally planned for, and that they were running out of food, they sent Vizintín back to the crash site. Since the return was entirely downhill, it only took him one hour to get back to the fuselage using a makeshift sleigh.
Parrado and Canessa hiked for several more days. First, they were able to reach the narrow valley that Parrado had seen on the top of the mountain, where they found the bed of Río San José, leading to Río Portillo which meets Río Azufre at Maitenes. They followed the river and reached the end of the snowline. Gradually, there appeared more and more signs of human presence, first some signs of camping, and finally on the ninth day, some cows. When they rested that evening, they were very tired and Canessa seemed unable to proceed further. As Parrado was gathering wood to build a fire, Canessa noticed what looked like a man on a horse at the other side of the river, and yelled at the near-sighted Parrado to run down to the banks. At first it seemed that Canessa had been imagining the man on the horse, but eventually they saw three men on horseback. Divided by Portillo River, Nando and Canessa tried to convey their situation, but the noise of the river made communication difficult.
One of the horsemen, a Chilean arriero named Sergio Catalán, shouted "tomorrow." They knew at this point they would be saved and settled to sleep by the river. During the evening dinner, Catalán discussed what he had seen with the other arrieros who were staying in a little summer ranch called Los Maitenes. Someone mentioned that several weeks before, the father of Carlos Paez, who was desperately searching for any possible news about the aircraft, had asked them about the Andes crash. The arrieros could not imagine that someone could still be alive. The next day Catalán took some loaves of bread and went back to the river bank. There he found the two men still on the other side of the river, on their knees and asking for help. Catalán threw them the loaves, which they immediately ate, and a pen and paper tied to a rock. Parrado wrote a note telling about the aircraft crash and asking for help. Then he tied the paper to a rock and threw it back to Catalán, who read it and gave them a sign that he understood.
Catalán rode on horseback for many hours westwards to bring help. During the trip he saw another arriero on the south side of Río Azufre and asked him to reach the boys and to bring them to Los Maitenes. Then he followed the river to its intersection with the Río Tinguiririca, where after passing a bridge he was able to reach the narrow route that linked the village of Puente Negro to the holiday resort of Termas del Flaco. Here, he was able to stop a truck and reach the police station at Puente Negro, where the news was finally dispatched to the Army command in San Fernando and then to Santiago. Meanwhile, Parrado and Canessa were rescued and they reached Los Maitenes, where they were fed and allowed to rest.
The following morning the rescue expedition left Santiago and, after a stop in San Fernando, moved eastwards. Two helicopters had to fly in the fog but reached a place near Los Maitenes just when Parrado and Canessa were passing on horseback while going to Puente Negro. Nando Parrado was recruited to fly back to the mountain in order to guide the helicopters to the remaining survivors. The news that people had survived the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 on 13 October had also leaked to the international press and a flood of reporters began to appear along the narrow route from Puente Negro to Termas del Flaco. The reporters hoped to be able to see and interview Parrado and Canessa about the crash and their survival ordeal.
In the morning of the day when the rescue started, those remaining at the crash site heard on their radio that Parrado and Canessa had been successful in finding help and that afternoon, 22 December 1972, two helicopters carrying search and rescue climbers arrived. The expedition (with Parrado on board) was not able to reach the crash site until the afternoon due to the difficulty of air travel through the Andes. The weather was very poor and the two helicopters were able to take only half of the survivors. They departed, leaving the rescue team and remaining survivors at the crash site to once again sleep in the fuselage, until a second expedition with helicopters could arrive the following morning. The second expedition arrived at daybreak on 23 December with the remaining survivors. They were taken to hospitals in Santiago for evaluation and were treated for a variety of conditions, including altitude sickness, dehydration, frostbite, broken bones, scurvy and malnutrition.
When first rescued, the survivors initially explained that they had eaten some cheese they had carried with them, planning to discuss the details in private with their families. They were pushed into the public eye when photos were leaked to the press and sensational articles were published.
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[6] (over the years, they also participated in the publication of two books, two films and an official website about the event).
The rescuers and a Chilean priest later returned to the crash site and buried the bodies of the deceased, 80 m (260 ft) from the aircraft. Close to the grave a stone pile with an iron cross was built. The remains of the fuselage were doused in gasoline and set alight.
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