On Oct. 12, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 took off from Montevideo, Uruguay, with 45 people (40 passengers and five crew members) on board. The plane had been chartered by the Old Christians Club amateur rugby team to transport the team’s players, friends, and family members to Santiago, Chile, for an exhibition match.
Due to bad weather, the plane was forced to land in Mendoza, Argentina, and stay overnight. The following afternoon, on Oct. 13, the plane again set out for Santiago with a charted course that would allow it to bypass the heart of the Andes and fly through a lower mountain pass. However, a little over an hour into the flight, the pilot misjudged his location and—with clearance from air traffic control—began to descend before the plane had made it out of the Andes. Unable to clear the ridgeline, it struck a mountain, losing both wings and its tail on impact. The front end of the plane then slid down the mountain before landing in a valley at an altitude of approximately 11,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘You’re dead. You are going to know what is in the last frontier of life,'” Canessa says of the crash. “When the plane lost the wings and tail, it began to slide at an incredible speed. I thought my feet were going to go through the back of my ears. So when it stopped, I couldn’t believe I was alive. It was absurd.”
When he first surveyed the wreckage and his surroundings, Canessa remembers feeling like he was in a nightmare. “I thought, ‘I will wake up. There’s a button I am meant to push and everything will be over,'” he says. “But there was no button.”
What happened to the surviving passengers?
The initial crash killed 12 people and left a number of the 33 surviving passengers injured. Five more people died during the first night and another succumbed to her injuries around a week later, leaving 27 still alive. Believing they would be rescued any day, the survivors endured subzero nighttime temperatures by creating a shelter out of the fuselage wreckage and rationing what little food and wine they found in the luggage—which ran out after about a week.
As the movie shows, the survivors saw several rescue planes flying overhead in the days that followed, but no one searching for them was able to spot the white plane wreckage in the snow. Around day 10, the survivors recovered a small transistor radio from the plane and heard the devastating news that the search had been called off and they were all presumed dead.
“I felt that the world was going on its way and that we were out of the world. It’s a very strange sensation to be alive while you are considered dead,” Canessa says of learning about the end of the search. “But it also resettled us in the sense that waiting for rescue was over. If we didn’t get ourselves out, we were all going to die.”
As the weeks passed and starvation set in, the survivors were ultimately forced to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive. Canessa says Society of the Snow’s depiction of the group’s discussions about whether to eat the bodies of the deceased is an “artistic” version of how they arrived at the decision.
“I told them, ‘This is my idea and I’m going to go out there and cut off a piece [of a body] and I respect what other people think,'” he says. “I thought that giving the example would be a good way to go because there was no plan B.”
While eating the bodies was a “humiliating” experience, according to Canessa, he says he motivated himself to keep going by thinking about reuniting with his mother.
“You are eating a dead person and the person is your friend and you wonder, ‘Should I do this? Or should I let myself die?” he says. “But I have seen how mothers cry when they lose their sons and I didn’t want my mother to go through that. I realized that when you have a reason for doing something, nothing stops you.”
The movie focuses on what Bayona refers to as the “generosity” of the act rather than exploiting it for shock value. “This is a horrible story that is never focused on the horror,” he told the BBC. “The way we approach the story is quite the opposite. It’s focused on the human aspect of the story and on the friendship, on the extreme generosity they had to each other.”
As the group waited for the snow to begin to melt in the spring thaw, further disaster struck when, on Oct. 29, two back-to-back avalanches buried the fuselage in snow, killing eight more people and trapping the rest inside for three days. Those who survived had to rely on the bodies entombed alongside them for food.
#Planecrash #ZackDfilms#Society Of The Snow #Andesmountaindisaster #disaster #historicaldocumentary #zackdfilmsfulldocumentary #survivingaplanecrash #facts #hurricane #earthquake #farfromhome #awayfromhome #andesmountains #historicaldocumentary
source