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The flight had to be interrupted due to a storm that hit the Andes
In October 1972, the rugby team of the very popular Stella Maris College in Montevideo was preparing for a friendly match scheduled for the Chile Old Boys Club in Santiago. The president of the university sports club, Daniel Juan, has hired one of Urgu’s FH-227 HD twin-engine turboprop passenger planes for the team preparing for the Chilean capital.
The aircraft, with forty passengers and five crew members on board, took off on October 12, 1972 from the Carrasco International Airport in the Uruguayan capital.
A relaxed atmosphere reigned on board and several of the players were accompanied by their families on a trip to Chile. The commander, Colonel Julio Cesar Ferradas, was an experienced pilot with more than five thousand flight hours,
whose first officer on this trip was Lieutenant Colonel Dante Hectór Lagurara.
Due to the storm in the Andes, the captain decided to interrupt the trip, requesting a landing permit at the Mendoza airport in Argentina.
The team spent the night in the great Argentine city,
but the scheduled takeoff for the morning had to be postponed again due to the still unfavorable weather conditions.
Between Mendoza and the destination, Santiago de Chile, we had to fly over the Andes mountain range. The route between the Argentine city and the Chilean capital is generally carried by larger aircraft in a direct direction over the Andes mountain range of 7600-7900 meters, but for a fully packed Fairchild that had the maximum required service height of 8,800 meters , the height would have been much safer. a longer route without going through the mountains.
However, the commander, adhering to the original flight plan, wanted to reach the Chilean capital by a shorter route, flying over the mountains.
They didn’t know they were running towards a rocky wall covered in mist
On the morning of October 13, they waited for permission to take off, as the storm that hit the Andes simply did not want to calm down. According to a recent weather forecast, a temporary improvement in the weather was expected in the early afternoon,
therefore, the captain decided not to wait any longer.
On Friday, October 13, 1972, at 2:18 pm local time, the Fairchild in Uruguay rose from the concrete and soon fell into low-lying clouds.
Flight 571 flew south for the first time following radio signals from the Malargüe control. Lieutenant Colonel Lagurara, first officer, informed the command that at 3:21 p.m. the Planchón Pass, 2,515 meters high, would be reached, from where the Chilean air control had to take the plane.
According to the flight plan, they would have started to descend crossing the Andes and turning north.
in the direction of the Pudahuel International Airport in the Chilean capital. The minerals of the Andes were shrouded in dense clouds, making visual orientation impossible; in such conditions, pilots can only fly using instruments.
His radio navigation was carried out by an inexperienced first officer who requested permission from the Santiago management at 3:24 p.m. to begin the descent. However, neither the crew of Flight 571 nor air traffic control knew
that due to the first mate’s wrong navigational calculations, the Fairchild still flies over the thickly foggy mountain ranges of the Andes.
Chilean control allowed the descent to begin at FL 115 (flight level 115, or 11,500 feet), or 3,500 feet. When the machine began to descend, it went into severe turbulence.
The commander, Colonel Ferrades, asked the passengers on board the radio to tie themselves to the seats.
There was an elevated and cheerful atmosphere in the cabin,
and the rugby “males” were in no hurry to follow the captain’s instructions, but continued to joke with each other. Some of the passengers seated by the windows noticed the gray and snowy rock walls looming out of the fragments of fog.
One of them even asked, “Aren’t we flying too close to the mountains?” A few seconds later, the answer came: accompanied by an indecent click, a great blow hit the fuselage of the plane. The lights went out, untethered passengers crashed to the floor as an icy hurricane crashed into the passenger compartment from the broken tail.
It seemed that they had no escape
In the dense fog, due to incorrect navigation, the plane began to descend prematurely, and when the pilots noticed it, it was too late. The Fairchild collided with a protruding rock, the half wings and tail of the plane were broken and the fuselage continued to slide down a sloping glacier.
before stopping at an altitude of 3,600 feet in thick snow.
Sixteen of the 45 people on board were killed instantly at the time of the accident, but 29 survived the moments of the catastrophic collision.
One of the passengers, medical student Roberto Canessa, had a horrible vision before recovering. Heard a low moan in the dark
and one of his traveling companions complained with a painful roar that he couldn’t see.
As she crawled close to him, he noticed that only half of his brain was sticking out and a huge metal crack pierced his belly. He recovered quickly and, as the sole professional lifeguard, immediately set about caring for the injured. Despite all efforts, five more seriously wounded died the next morning.
The survivors and the lightly wounded had to organize their survival. The broken rear of the cabin was walled in with suitcases to prevent snow from entering the cabin. They also found that the textile cover that could be removed from the seats could be used as a blanket against the freezing cold of the high mountains. From the metal frames of the seats, they gathered stretchers for their limbs for the wounded and tried to collect everything edible from the machine’s shattered kitchen. At first they still expected to find them quickly, but as the days passed one after another, despair took hold of them.
On the eighth day after the disaster, another comrade died and the meager food supply ran out.
The survivors could not know that on the eighth day of the tragedy, just when another of their companions had died, the authorities had officially ceased searches for the missing machine. A working transistor bag radio emerged from the rubble, and when it was turned on, they only heard the news that the investigation had stopped. Because of this, many began to sob and others began to rage: it seemed that they had no escape.
A distant helicopter noise signaled that they had come to life
The 27 survivors found themselves in an almost completely desperate situation. Food shortages, cookies, some chocolate bars and some bottles of wine were quickly sold out despite the most careful attention.
At first, their suitcases were stripped of their skins to satisfy their hunger, but they were soon faced with the terrible realization that the only edible thing available to them in the world of frozen rocks were the corpses of their dead companions.
The unthinkable has happened; To survive, they were forced to remain in cannibalism. Occasionally organized field trips during the first weeks did not yield any results. The immobile survivors could not be left alone,
and in minus ten to twenty degrees, aggravated by blizzards, the wreckage was the only shelter.
Therefore, it was decided to form a small group of the best survivors who would be willing to try the impossible and bring help. The determination was further strengthened by another disaster on the 17th day of the tragedy: a sudden avalanche wiped out the deaths of six survivors.
Although they found the plane’s broken tail with the batteries inside, they were still unable to bring the cockpit radio to life. On December 13, two months after the disaster, the three survivors with the best physique, Roberto Canessa, Antonio Vizintin and Nando Parrado, were determined to
Let them climb the mountain and go until they find help.
They knew they were embarking on a potentially deadly and dubiously successful mission, but that was their last hope.
They tried to break through the icy rocks in extremely difficult conditions. On the second day of his departure, Antoni Vizintin also gave up and turned around, but Canessa and Parrado gritted their teeth and continued the fierce journey.
After eight days of bitter march, they managed to descend from the mountains and meet the first man, a Chilean who immediately alerted the authorities.
After the official investigation was suspended, one of the children’s parents hired a helicopter pilot,
and sacrificing all their savings for this, they continued their investigation as individuals.
News of the survivors spread like wildfire across the country. Early in the morning of December 20, the survivors of the Farchild shipwreck noticed the distant roar of the engine of the survivors who were already half conscious of their weakness.
At first they thought they were just hallucinating,
but the growing roar brought new hope to their hearts.
Within minutes, the source of the sound also appeared, a helicopter that first flew over the snow-covered plane in low flight and then descended and landed right next to the wreck. On December 20, 1972, the survivors of Flight 571 were brought back to life from deadly hopelessness.
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