Rescue of the pilot Antonio Sena, who was 36 days lost in the Amazon jungle

It was a Monday in January when the pilot Antonio Sena suffered a plane crash in the bowels of the Brazilian Amazon. There, in the immensity of the jungle, he was trapped for 36 days, in which he survived with a machete and the help of monkeys, whom he observed in his search for food.

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Sena, 36, had been hired to run an air taxi service at an illegal gold mine located in the heart of the Amazon, between the states of Pará and Amapá. Mid-flight, the engine of his small aircraft stopped. He managed to control the direction of the device for a few minutes and ended up crashing into a remote stream.

He got out of the plane unharmed and rushed to rescue the food he was carrying: three bottles of water, twelve breads, four cans of soda, a rope and a cloth sack. Soon after, the aircraft exploded.

“I spent the first night and tried to assimilate everything that was going to happen. Many years ago he had undergone survival training in the jungle, at the time when he was working for another air taxi company, “the Brazilian pilot told EFE in an interview.

As the manual dictates, the first seven days he stayed at the accident site to wait for rescue teams. Several planes flew over the area, but with each passing day the noise was less intense and their hopes of making it out alive as well.

On the fifth day of waiting, he decided to record a farewell video for his family.

“That night I decided to talk to God. I said: ‘If your will is for me to find my family, give me strength, because I have tried alone and I have not succeeded. It seems like it worked, “he recalls.

The next morning he began to devise a plan to get out of the clutches of the Amazon rainforest, which he describes as “a great pulsating living organism.” A forest with many forests inside.

“On the eighth day I got all my things and started walking east. ‘I’m not going to die here,’ I told myself. ‘I’m not going to die’“, he recalls.

It was then that he entered the lush jungle with the help of an improvised machete that he made with a piece of wood, a razor and a knife.

Inside the forest the routine was the same for long days: I would wake up in the light of dawn and walk for hours in the direction of the sun until shortly after noon, when he stopped to look for a place to camp, always away from the rivers.

This is because water, he says, attracts the great predators of the Amazon: the jaguar, the alligator and the poisonous anaconda.

“Everyone says that it is a region that is full of jaguars. I never found one. I think the mixture of God and knowing how to get away from them helped me, “he says.

Despite her temper, fear surfaced at night, when the noise of nature broke the silence.

“The first days, mainly at night, I was very scared. It is when the jungle manifests itself. There are many unknown noises and since you do not recognize them they seem to awaken your most intimate fears“He confesses.” Over time I began to recognize some noises. It is impressive how the jungle deceives you. He cheated on me a lot. “

THE FOOD SEARCH

During the 36 days he spent lost in the jungle, hunger, he remembers, was “very common.” When the few foods he carried with him ran out, he turned to nature. But how to recognize if its fruits were poisonous or not?

“I could not find the fruits that you find in the market: banana, mango, pineapple. There is none of that in the middle of the jungle. I began to observe small white fruits and did not know what it was. I saw that they fell from the trees because the macaques were moving them. I saw that they ate. If the monkeys eat, it is good“, he narrates.

Later he discovered that it was breu, a fruit widely used by the cosmetic industry. He found cocoa four times and three nambu eggs, a characteristic bird of the Amazon.

The lack of food greatly weakened him. In 36 days he lost 25 kilos.

THE NOISE OF THE SIERRA

Sena had been wandering in the jungle for more than 30 days when he heard the noise of a chainsaw from afar. His strength had reached the limit. He had cramps and vision loss, but decided to do his last effort.

He went into a swamp and crossed a river. Soaked, he continued walking through the forest chasing the distant noise. It was then that he found a white tarp and, miles later, a man.

“He looked at me very scared. He stood with the chestnuts in his hand,” he remembers.

This was the rescue:

Minutes later another man arrived and together they walked to the base of the chestnut pickers. Once there, the rescue teams and his family were notified via radio. It was the end of his odyssey.

“My brothers did not give up at any time, they always believed that he was alive. I felt their strength. They did not give up”, she tells through tears.

Sena, who recently flew over the crash site, will now tell his story in a book entitled “36 days: the saga of the plane pilot who fell in the Amazon and was reunited with God,” by the publisher Buzz.

“I was transformed within that jungle. My brothers were also transformed. Thank God that story is transforming many people as well. It is the only thing we want. Only that,” he says.