11 Chilling Facts About the 1972 Andes Plane Crash

On October 13, 1972, a Fairchild FH-227D airplane took off from Mendoza, Argentina, and charted a course across the Andes to Santiago, Chile. Aboard the plane were five crew members and 40 passengers, most of whom were members of a Uruguayan amateur rugby team—whose ages ranged from late teens to mid-twenties—and their friends and family. Tragically, the plane crashed, leaving the survivors trapped in the inhospitable snow-covered mountains. By the time rescue teams arrived on December 22 and 23, only 16 people were still alive. Here are 11 facts about the chilling disaster of the Andes plane crash.

Human error caused the plane to crash.

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was chartered by the Old Christians Club rugby team to fly them to a match in Chile. The flight left Uruguay on October 12, but bad weather forced them to land in Argentina. Legally, the Uruguayan plane wasn’t allowed to be grounded in Argentina for more than 24 hours, so the pilots were under pressure to get it into the air the next day—which just so happened to be unlucky Friday the 13th.

Looking back on the situation with hindsight, survivor Nando Parrado—whose mother and sister were on the plane with him and perished—told The Guardian, “I would never go near that aeroplane. A Fairchild FH-227D, very underpowered engines, full of people, completely loaded, flying over the highest mountains in South America, in bad weather. I mean, no way.” Of the 78 FH-227s that were made, a staggering 23 of them ended up crashing.

However, while the aircraft itself and weather conditions were far from ideal, it was human error that doomed Flight 571. The plane was flown by co-pilot Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Héctor Lagurara, with more experienced pilot Colonel Julio César Ferradas overseeing. Lagurara mistakenly thought that they had passed Curicó, when they were actually still around 43 miles (70 kilometers) east. When the plane broke through the clouds while descending, the pilots realized that they were still in the mountains. Lagurara immediately pulled up, but it was too late—the plane crashed into a ridge, breaking off both wings and the tail. The fuselage then slid down a mountain into a glacier that sat at an elevation of around 12,000 feet (3658 meters).

Seventeen people died during the plane crash or within 24 hours.

During the crash and in its immediate aftermath, 12 people were killed; five people died from injuries sustained inside the cockpit and cabin and a further seven people fell from the aircraft.

Once on the ground, medical students Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino jumped into action to treat the wounded, many of whom had been crushed by the seats compressing forward when the plane slammed into the snow. Arturo Nogueira broke both of his legs, while Rafael Echavarren had the flesh of his calf stripped from the bone. A metal tube had lodged itself into Enrique Platero’s stomach, which, when removed, pulled out some of his intestines (surprisingly, despite this, he immediately started helping others).

The temperature plummeted to −30° F (−34° C) when night fell. Marcelo Pérez plugged the open tail end with loose seats, luggage, and snow. They used their cigarette lighters to burn flammable materials—which amounted to $7500 in paper bills and a little bit of wood—but the fires didn’t last long. Five more people succumbed to their injuries during that first night.

Planes flew over the crash site, but the survivors weren’t spotted.

Authorities quickly realized that something had gone wrong when Flight 571 didn’t make it to Santiago. The survivors thought that search and rescue parties would struggle to see the white fuselage in the snow (they were right), so they tried to make themselves more visible. They started to write SOS on the roof of the plane with lipstick and nail polish, but couldn’t make the letters big enough. They also used suitcases to create a huge cross in the snow, but it wasn’t seen by passing planes.

The survivors saw and heard a few planes pass overheard, and even thought that one dipped its wings in acknowledgment of spotting them—but when help failed to arrive, they realized that they hadn’t been seen. A transistor radio had been found and fixed, and while it sadly couldn’t transmit (efforts to fix the cockpit radio with batteries later found in the tail also failed), they were able to listen to news updates on the rescue efforts. But on their 11th day stranded, they learned that the search had been called off. Poor weather conditions made the search too dangerous, and there were doubts that anyone would still be alive, so authorities decided to look for the wreck and human remains after the snow had melted come January.

Once their limited food supplies ran out, the survivors began eating the bodies of the dead.

There was no flora or fauna on the glacier and only a paltry amount of food was found in everyone’s luggage. The survivors rationed the chocolate, nuts, jam, and wine for as long as they could, but, facing starvation, they eventually started eating the flesh of the dead. The cutting of bodies was done out of sight and by a select few.

“We did it of necessity,” Antonio Vizintín explained. “It was like a Communion.” This religious reasoning didn’t convince everyone, though. Numa Turcatti, for instance, barely ate any meat and often “threw it away when we weren’t looking,” José Luis Inciarte later said. But the majority were reluctantly willing to resort to cannibalism, with Canessa saying that they even “made a pact that, if we died, we would be happy to put our bodies to the service of the rest of the team.”

Once rescued, the survivors didn’t initially tell the press that they had eaten human flesh to survive. “I wanted the parents of the dead to hear it first,” Canessa explained. “I wanted to go to their houses and tell them. I thought they had the right to hear it from us.” However, pictures of human remains around the plane soon leaked to the press and one journalist even suggested that the survivors had killed in order to get meat. Just a few days after being rescued, they were forced to hold a press conference to address the rumors (above).

Although many newspapers ran sensationalist articles, various religious figures spoke out in support of the survivors. Two spokesmen from the Catholic Church declared that they had “acted justifiably” given the circumstances, while Pope Paul VI sent a telegram in which he absolved them of guilt.

Sixteen days after the crash, the survivors were buried by an avalanche—killing a further eight people. 

On the night of October 29, an avalanche struck the fuselage. Snow broke through the barricade at the tail end and completely covered the sleeping survivors. A few people managed to free themselves and quickly began digging out those around them, but eight people suffocated to death.

They used a metal pole to create a breathing hole through the layers of snow above the plane. They eventually managed to dig a hole that they could crawl out of, but a blizzard forced them back into the snow-filled plane. After a few days of being trapped, they reluctantly began eating the flesh from the recently deceased.

Three of the survivors climbed a mountain in an effort to escape.

All excursions away from the crash site—to find the tail end, to search for fallen people and luggage, and to reach a higher vantage point—had been short-lived due to the deep snow, high mountains, and freezing night-time temperatures. But Nando Parrado wanted to give it one last shot while he still had the strength to do so. “I knew that I had no chance in those mountains,” he later wrote. “But what did it matter? I was a dead man already.”

He convinced Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintín to accompany him, and the trio set off on December 12, armed with dried meat and a handmade communal sleeping bag. The co-pilot had died repeating that they had passed Curicó, so they set their sights on the western ridge, believing that the green fields of Chile lay just out of sight.

With Parrado in the lead, the inexperienced and underequipped group made their way up the steep mountainous incline. On the third day of climbing, Parrado reached a nearly vertical wall of ice covered in densely packed snow, so he used his walking stick to carve steps. Once at the summit of the 15,092 foot (4600 meter) mountain—which Parrado named Mount Seler after his father—he realized that the co-pilot was wrong about them crashing near the edge of the Andes. “The horizon was crowded in every direction with snow-covered mountains, each as steep and forbidding as the one I’d just climbed,” Parrado recalled.

Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa trekked for nine days to get out of the mountains.

Due to their limited provisions and need to tell the other survivors of the situation, Vizintín was sent back to the plane—a journey which only took an hour thanks to a suitcase that had been turned into a sled—while Parrado and Canessa ventured onwards.

The pair hiked for another six days—ultimately covering around 37 miles (60 kilometers)—and eventually came down into a green valley filled with cows. Across a wide river, they spotted three men, but although they were seen, their calls for help couldn’t be heard over the current. The men returned the next day; one of them, Sergio Catalán, had brought paper and a pen, which he threw across the river with the aid of rocks. Parrado explained who they were and that they needed immediate help.

Catalán travelled nearly 75 miles (120 kilometers) to alert the authorities, while Armando Serda looped around to a river crossing to collect Parrado and Canessa. The exhausted and starving pair were taken to a farmer’s hut and promptly fed. The next day, December 22, a rescue team arrived, but they needed help pinpointing the crash site, so Parrado was loaded into a helicopter to act as their guide. Only a handful of the survivors could be flown to safety that day, but four of the rescuers stayed with those who were left behind until the helicopters returned the next morning.

The 16 survivors were taken to hospital to recuperate from malnutrition, frostbite, and altitude sickness. They were all severely underweight; Parrado, for instance, had lost almost half of his body weight.

The remains of the dead—except Rafael Echavarren—were buried at the crash site.

It was decided that the dead would be buried in a communal grave at the crash site. A cross and memorial plaque marks the spot. The only exception was Rafael Echavarren, who specifically requested to be buried in his home country; his body was collected and interred in the family mausoleum back in Uruguay.

Some of the survivors and their family members regularly visit the crash site—a journey that takes a few days and involves hiking and/or horseback riding. Seler Parrado made the tough trip every year for 18 years to pay his respects to his wife and daughter; his own ashes were buried there when he died. Survivor Eduardo Strauch still frequently visits the site as co-director of Alpine Expeditions—a tour company that leads people to the crash site and was founded by Ricardo Peña, who found Strauch’s wallet in the mountains in 2005 and returned it to him.

The survivors meet up every year on December 22.

Each December 22, the survivors of the crash meet up to commemorate the anniversary of their rescue and to remember those who didn’t make it off the mountain. In 2022, on the 50th anniversary of their rescue, they marked the occasion in an extra special way. “We took a photograph of 147 persons who are alive because we came back. So this is a story of life,” Parrado toldThe Guardian. In 2012, on the 40th anniversary of the plane crash, they also finally played the rugby game that they had been traveling for back in 1972.

Six of the survivors have written books about their experience.

The best-known book about the crash remains Piers Paul Read’s Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974)—which heavily features personal interviews—but six of the survivors later wrote memoirs to give their own more detailed thoughts on the hellish 72-day experience. Nando Parrado’s Miracle in the Andes (2006) came first and was followed by Eduardo Strauch’s Out of the Silence (2012), Pedro Algorta’s Into the Mountains (2014), Roberto Canessa’s I Had to Survive (2016), Carlitos Páez’s After the Tenth Day (2019), and Coche Inciarte’s Memories of the Andes (2020).

Many of the survivors had cameo roles in Society of the Snow.

There have so far been three feature films about the Andes plane crash. First up was René Cardona’s Mexican film Survive! (1976), which was described by Roger Ebert as “dumb, uninspired, even crude.” Next came Frank Marshall’s American production Alive (1993), on which Parrado—played by Ethan Hawke in the film—worked as the technical advisor. Lastly is J. A. Bayona’s award-winning and critically-acclaimed Spanish-language Society of the Snow (2023).

Bayona’s film includes eight cameos from survivors, plus one from a family member. Three of the most prominent and poignant cameos are those of Parrado, Canessa, and Páez. Parrado holds the door open at the airport for Agustín Pardella, the actor who plays him. Canessa plays a doctor—fitting given his career as a pediatric cardiologist—at the hospital who can be seen behind the actor playing him, Matías Recalt. Páez plays his own father and announces the names of the survivors over the radio.

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