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The Survivors of Flight 571, 1972


 

On October 13th 1972, the members of the Old Christians Amateur Rugby Club of Montevideo, Uruguay, boarded flight 571 to Santiago, Chile, where they were to take on a local team in a friendly match. Most of the players were less than eighteen years old. They laughed and joked as they took their seats, tossing a ball between the rows and looking forward to the match. They sang and bounced around, as they usually did on their team bus. The teenagers talked about their sweethearts, their favourite rugby players and which universities their scholarships would take them to when they got back. No-one suspected what destiny had in store for them – a strange and shocking fate, for those who survived at least.

 

An hour into the flight, the co-pilot asked the steward to calm things down at the back of the plane, as the teenagers were making an insufferable racket. Roy refused to stay in one place, insisting that he needed to stretch his legs. The steward scolded him gently; after all, he was just a kid. Nando was busy acting out his latest performances with the ladies for his mates, despite the presence of his mother and sister Suzanna. “Let’s calm it down, boys! Keep your energy for the match!” the coach yelled at them. Roberto was in a calmer mood, observing the clouds out of the window and daydreaming about life as a medical student. Suddenly, they were told to fasten their seatbelts as the plane entered a pocket of turbulence. They laughed at the attempt to scare them into taking their seats. The flight attendant insisted this was serious, but to no avail. The young men would not follow instruction, one of them even grabbing the microphone and making an announcement to his fellow players: “Sit down you pack of savages, by order of the pilot! And put a sock in it!” They fell about laughing. Nothing was going to befall the plane that hummed like a great fly in the sky. Did the pilot take them for children? They were hardened rugby players whose whole lives lay ahead of them; they feared nothing, for they were invincible. All of a sudden, a pocket of air shook the passengers, almost sending the steward toppling to the floor. Their expressions changed utterly as they realised the danger they were in. The players had no other choice but to sit down and smoke cigarettes as they waited for the danger to pass. The plane lurched up and down in the air as the passengers gripped their armrests discreetly. Nobody wanted to appear cowardly, yet they were worried. One of the players asked the flight attendant: “Are we supposed to be flying this close to the mountain range?” The steward didn’t answer, but his face was ashen. All of a sudden the plane’s nose jerked up, scaring the passengers. Their hearts were in their mouths as adrenaline pumped in their chests. Some began to cry. Then the rear of the plane struck the mountainside with a deafening screech that sounded like a cry from hell. They were lost; they would all die, and so young. The plane broke in two, and the front section slid down the mountain for over a hundred meters before crashing into a bank of snow.

 

The pilots were dead. In the rear of the plane, the scene was unthinkable. Nando was unconscious, his sister Suzanna trying in vain to wake him. Roberto was the first to pull himself up and help the others to shelter. They counted the survivors; out of forty-five passengers, only twenty-nine were not dead or fatally wounded. They struggled to clear a path for the passengers, with all the seats twisted and turned upside down. The fuselage was intact, but the seats had been thrown toward the front of the plane by the crash.

 

Five days later, without food or water, the survivors were still waiting for help to arrive. The group had made a shelter inside the fuselage, protected from the wind and snow by a barricade of suitcases. They had tried everything. They’re tried writing SOS on the roof of the plane using lipstick, but had run out. They’d made signal fires with anything that would burn, but in vain. The aircraft’s white body was invisible against the snow, and the mountain range was vast. Roy knew a little about electronics, and using a transistor he managed to fashion a long antenna that enabled them to pick up radio signals. According to what they said on the radio, the Chilean Air Force was conducting a search and rescue operation. This gave them hope. Nando woke up, and the pair tried to find ways to survive while they waited for help to come. Their provisions were meagre – no more than the few snacks they had brought and which would vanish like snow in the sun: eight bars of chocolate, a tin of mussels, three small pots of jam, a can of almonds, a handful of dates, some sweets, prunes and several bottles of wine. The cold starved them. On the eleventh day, Roy intercepted some bad news: the search had been called off. He told the crew: “Hey boys, here’s some good news! They’ve called off the search!” The others began to sob, and to pray, and to lose their minds. A dead silence fell within the plane. Finally, someone plucked up the courage to ask Nando: “Why the hell is that good news?” Nando replied calmly, “Because it means that we’re going to get out of here on our own.” 

 

Roberto would later tell the journalists: “Our common goal was to survive — but what we lacked was food.  We had long since run out of the meagre pickings we'd found on the plane, and there was no vegetation or animal life to be found. After just a few days, we were feeling the sensation of our own bodies consuming themselves just to remain alive. Before long, we would become too weak to recover from starvation. We knew the answer, but it was too terrible to contemplate. The bodies of our friends and team-mates, preserved outside in the snow and ice, contained vital, life-giving protein that could help us survive.  But could we do it?”

 

The survivors could wait no longer; they could not sleep and mope around the fuselage indefinitely. Nando tried to persuade Roberto to cross the mountains on foot. Roberto was not convinced, preferring to wait until the milder weather of December. Finally, the pair summoned up all their courage, and one morning they left the wreckage to cross the mountains. They faced a long ten-day trek; an extraordinary adventure that they would remember for the rest of their days. Nando and Roberto braved the storms, the snow and the wind. To make it they would have to find depths of physical and psychological strength they never knew they had. They had brought provisions; pieces of the bodies of their friends, their families, those who had not been lucky enough to survive the crash or the eight weeks that followed.

 

On the seventy-second day, the fourteen remaining survivors huddled in the fuselage heard a sound rising up over the mountains. They came outside, and to their amazement saw two helicopters in the distance. Their joy was unrestrained as they waved their arms, shouting and weeping. Nando and Roberto had made it across the Andes, and had sent help to rescue them. They were saved. 

 

Alan Alfredo Geday

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