Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571

Podcast Transcript

On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed into the Andes Mountains.

For the following 72 days, survivors of the crash were stranded in the ice and snow, forced to survive in sub-zero temperatures, battling starvation and avalanches.

Desperate to escape the mountains, two of the crash survivors trekked across the harsh terrain for 10 days, eventually finding rescue for the remaining survivors.

Learn more about the survival of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

On October 12, 1972, the Old Christian Rugby Club of Montevideo, Uruguay, chartered a plane to Santiago, Chile, for a match against the Old Boys club.

The plane departed from Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo with 45 people on board, including 40 passengers and five crew members. Despite a smooth departure, it was soon forced to make an early landing in Mendoza, Argentina, due to poor weather.

This delay caused the plane to take off from Mendoza at 2:18 pm the following day.

The plane was on an indirect course south through the Pass of Planchón, allowing it to clear the Andes Mountains. This was because the plane, a Fairchild Hiller FH-227D, was not built to fly high enough to safely clear the mountain range, making it unsafe to fly the direct path to Santiago, Chile.

Due to the weather conditions, cloud cover obscured the sky, preventing the pilots from confirming their location visually and forcing them to rely on their instruments.

The inability to visually see their location led to the co-pilot incorrectly identifying their location to Chilean air traffic control and getting clearance to start landing procedures despite still being over the Andes.

As the plane started its descent, it encountered severe turbulence and rapidly fell hundreds of feet. From there, the passengers of the plane noticed that the aircraft was uncomfortably close to the mountains.

The plane then struck a ridge of one of the mountains, causing it to lose both its wings and tail. From there, the front part of the plane slid down the side of the mountain before it finally stopped.

The plane was stuck in a valley known as the Valley of Tears, which was at an altitude of 11,500 feet or 3505 meters and located right in the heart of the Andes Mountains.

The initial crash had killed twelve people and left most of the remaining injured, but their nightmare was just beginning.

The Chilean Air Search and Rescue Service, or SARS, had received notice that the plane never landed within an hour of the crash. In response, the SARS sent four aircraft towards the last reported location on the Curicó corridor.

The SARS Officials reported a few hours later that they were unable to locate the crash. Upon reviewing the radio messages, they concluded that the plane had likely crashed in the Andes.

As they believed that the crash was in one of the more inaccessible locations of the mountain range, they reached out to the Andes Rescue Group in Chile for assistance.

Unfortunately for the search team, they too were looking in the incorrect area.

Desperate for help, the survivors took action, knowing that planes could be looking for them. They took lipstick out of luggage bags and attempted to write “S.O.S” on the roof of the remainder of the plane to grab the attention of potential rescuers. They also tried to fashion a cross on the snow with their luggage.

Despite the rescuers flying over the crash site three times, they did not notice the signs made by the survivors. The letters made on the plane were too small for the rescuers to see, and the cross wasn’t noticed.

Part of why they weren’t seen was that the remainder of the plane was white. This caused the wreckage to blend in with the snowy mountainside on which the survivors were stranded.

The harsh conditions of the Andes Mountains made the rescuers believe that the chances of surviving the crash and the elements were exceptionally low.

This resulted in the search teams being called off after eight days. The plan was to resume the search after the snow melted in two months. Things moved from search and rescue to recovery.

Surviving for two months would be incredibly difficult for the survivors. Their numbers were rapidly dropping, with six survivors dying in the next ten days, five of whom died on the first night.

The survivors remained hopeful that they would be rescued soon, but in the meantime, they had fashioned a shelter out of the wreckage and rationed the remaining food they found in the luggage.

To get water, they used metallic sheets found under the seats of the plane to make a water collector powered by the sun.

The shelter was constructed using the remaining luggage, plane seats, and snow, effectively closing off the back end of the plane to protect the occupants from the freezing temperatures.

Around day 10, the survivors received devastating news. They had recovered a transistor radio from the plane and heard that their search had been called off and that they were believed to be dead. They now knew that no help was coming.

If they wanted to survive, they would need to do so themselves.

A massive problem was food. Where they had crashed, there was no vegetation or animals, as they were far above the tree line.

To combat hunger, they initially ate cotton from inside the seats and leather from their shoes and belts, but that made them sick.

They soon had to make a hard decision if they didn’t want to starve to death.

Their friends and relatives who had died had their bodies preserved in the snow outside. After having multiple lengthy discussions, there was no alternative; they would need to resort to cannibalism.

One of the survivors, Roberto Canessa, described this experience in an interview with Time Magazine. He stated that eating the bodies was a “humiliating” experience, but that there was no other option.

Canessa cut into a body with a piece of broken windshield glass and ate part of the flesh. His actions then prompted others over the next few days to join.

Not surprisingly, the survivors initially struggled with cannibalism. Some downright refused, while others could only eat skin, fat, or muscle. To make the situation more bearable, they tried to dry out the meat in the sun. Eventually, though, all parts of the body, including the brain and heart, would need to be eaten in the name of survival.

As all of the survivors were Roman Catholic, this decision was not made lightly. Many feared that they would be eternally damned by the act, but others justified it by comparing the cannibalism to eating the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine at communion.

Many would eat flesh, but only the minimum required to survive.

A little over two weeks after the crash, the next trial for the survivors occurred.

On the evening of October 29, an avalanche struck the survivor’s shelter. This avalanche entered the structure of the remaining plane and almost filled it completely with snow and ice.

This avalanche smothered eight people to death, including the survivors’ leader, Marcelo Parez, and the final surviving woman of the flight, Liliana Methol.

Methol had become a motherly figure for many on the flight, and had also helped nurse many of the survivors back to health, so her death was particularly hard. To honor her memory, the survivors decided not to eat her body and leave it untouched.

A massive problem caused by the avalanche was that the survivors were trapped inside the plane with only about three feet of space left between the floor and ceiling.

If they were to stay on the plane, they would run out of oxygen and suffocate. So, using a pole and luggage racks, survivors managed to pry open the windscreens of the cockpit and make a hole through the snow for fresh air to enter the plane.

After two days of digging, they managed to make a tunnel from the cockpit to the surface, but were immediately forced to re-enter the plane after they encountered a blizzard.

Some survivors have cited this avalanche as the worst part of their 72 days stranded….which is saying a lot considering they had to eat human flesh.

The blizzard would last for three days, trapping the survivors with those who had died from the avalanche. On the third day, the group would be forced into cannibalizing those who died from the avalanche.

After a few days, the temperature rose and some of the snow began to melt away, allowing the remaining survivors to leave the plane. The survivors now knew that they would need to get help if they wanted to live.

The survivors believed that they were in Chile because of the co-pilot’s earlier incorrect statements. Using that information, they believed that civilization would be closest in the West. They were also under the impression that they were only at an elevation of 2,100 meters.

Both of these assumptions turned out to be incorrect. They had never reached Chile and were actually in Argentina. Additionally, the altimeter of the aircraft was broken, and they were actually at an elevation of 3,664 meters.

Survivors initially began to make brief expeditions into the areas surrounding the aircraft, but quickly realized their malnourishment and dehydration, mixed with snow blindness and the extreme temperatures, would make traveling basically impossible.

A team consisting of Canessa, Antonio Vizintín, and Nando Parrado was selected to be the expedition team and was given larger rations of flesh and the warmest possible clothes for their expeditions. To help preserve their strength, they were excused from their daily tasks and focused on training to survive the journey.

The team wanted to head West, but a giant mountain prevented them from taking that route. This made the team travel east instead, hoping that the valley would eventually turn in that direction.

While traveling, they actually found the tail of the aircraft, which was still mostly intact. They scavenged the tail and found luggage with some food, supplies, and batteries. The tail gave them shelter for a night and helped keep them warm.

They ultimately decided to return to the crash site to disconnect the radio and bring it to the tail of the plane in the hope that the batteries would power the radio. After days of trying to start the radio, they realized that it wouldn’t work.

The expedition group then returned to the main crash site once more, knowing that if they wanted to survive, they would need to make the journey down the mountains.

While back at the main camp, three more survivors would die. They needed to leave now, if anyone had a hope of surviving.

To survive the nights, the remaining survivors made a sleeping bag out of insulation, electrical wire, and waterproof fabric from the ac unit for the expedition crew. They then gave the journey-men t enough supplies for three days and with that, set them off.

They had no gear, no map, no compass, and no experience, and to make matters worse quickly realized that the expedition would take longer than they thought, so Vizintín was sent back so the other two would have a better chance to survive.

Parrado and Canessa descended through the valley, fighting the harsh landscape and cold temperatures.

They hiked for another seven days, eventually reaching Chile and a river. They continued to descend down the river, getting past the snowline and starting to see random signs of life, like a soup can and cows.

They eventually stumbled across three men on horseback on the other side of a raging river. They called for help, but the men were unable to hear him and said they would come back the next day.

When they returned, the men threw a rock with a piece of paper and a pencil to the survivors. On the paper, Parrado said that they had come from a plane crash in the mountains, had been walking for ten days, had friends left on the mountain, and needed the men to come get them.

The Chileans motioned that they understood and threw a loaf of bread across the river before riding west for the next 10 hours to get help. While traveling, the Chileans encountered another man on horseback and directed him towards the survivors to escort them to a nearby village.

He did so and took the survivors on horseback to the village of Los Mautenes. When the initial rider arrived at a police station, they reported that there were survivors of the plane crash.

With the report that there were survivors, the Chilean Air Force used three helicopters and Parrado’s guidance to search for and find the wreckage of the aircraft.

They arrived at the plane on December 22, 1972, but were only able to take half the survivors, leaving eight survivors and four rescuers behind for a night. The next day, December 23, all the remaining survivors had been rescued.

The survivors initially lied to the public about how they managed to survive for the grueling 72 days, claiming they ate cheese and other items until they ran out before switching to vegetation.

However, reports of cannibalism were published in the media almost immediately. This led to the survivors needing to make a press conference five days after the rescue ended, explaining their actions.

There was initially some controversy, but most people understood. Additionally, a priest cleared them of their actions, and Pope Paul VI sent the survivors a telegram indicating their actions were acceptable given the circumstances, reducing the backlash.

Those who didn’t survive were buried in a common grave at the crash site.

Families of those who died and the survivors built a black obelisk at Las Lágrimas glacier, the location of the crash in 2006, and they opened the Andes Museum in Montevideo in 2013.

The site is now accessible by multi-day guided treks from the small settlement of El Sosneado, Argentina, where visitors are asked to treat the area with solemn respect.

Only sixteen of the initial 45 people aboard the plane survived the crash.

In the end, the story of Flight 571 endures as more than a lurid tale of cannibalism; it is a study in human resolve, cooperation, and survival under overwhelming odds.