Survivors by the crashed wreckage of the doomed plane. Only 16 of the 45 on board survived
Looking out of the plane’s window, something felt very wrong. We were surely far too low in the sky. The tips of the wings were only yards from the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Andes. What was the pilot thinking?
The mood on board had been fantastic — all my old rugby mates together on our way to a match in Chile, laughing and joking and singing, as young men do. But things had suddenly taken a terrifying turn.
I felt the plane drop into a pocket of turbulence. Then another. It tried to pull up and gain altitude.
But although the pilot had the engines at full thrust, they simply were not powerful enough. A moment later there was a hideous sound as a wing was lost to the mountain-top, followed by a shattering explosion, the sound of crumpling metal and a spinning descent.
We were flung around as if in a hurricane. I felt stunned and dizzy and sick to my stomach as the body of the plane made contact with the snowy mountainside and began careering down it like a toboggan (I would later find out that we’d been travelling at around 200mph).
I was gripped by the realisation that I was going to die. I held on to my seat so fiercely that I tore off chunks of fabric with my bare hands. Bowing my head, I waited for the final blow that would send me into oblivion. But it didn’t happen.
We came to a violent stop. My seat, into which I was still strapped, ripped away from its moorings and ploughed into the one in front — a chain reaction that didn’t stop until all the seats were piled up against the cockpit. But I was still breathing. I was alive!
All around me the air was filled with the moans and cries of the injured, along with the pungent fumes of jet fuel. The body of the plane was wide open, its fuselage torn apart and its tail section missing. There were mountains all around us where the rest of the plane should have been and a blizzard was whipping aside everything in its path, lashing us with cold.
Like shadows from another world, heads and hands started to move about in their dislodged chairs. Someone behind me moved the tangle of seats and metal that was pinning me in. I turned round to see my old friend Gustavo Zerbino — like me, a medical student.
He looked at me as if to say: ‘You’re alive, too!’ Wordlessly, we asked ourselves: ‘Now what? Where do we begin?’
Together we clambered through the twisted and mangled wreckage of the plane. Many had lost their lives. Others were horribly maimed and injured.
An instinct to act kicked in, helping us to take our first steps. There was no time for doubts and questions. ‘This one’s alive . . . this one’s dead,’ murmured Gustavo as we moved about the ruptured cabin.
The cold was unimaginable. Instead of the 75 degrees it had been inside the cabin, it was now 10 degrees below zero. We opened luggage in search of jackets and sweaters, and T-shirts for bandages. Gustavo and I treated wounds, felt pulses, consoled.
God, I’m exhausted. Why is it so hard to breathe? The air was so thin I could barely function. For the first time I asked myself: ‘Where the hell are we? How could a plane, filled with fuel, hit a mountain ridge and not explode?’
Darkness fell. Within minutes it was pitch black. We used a lighter to see, all the while fearing we might ignite the jet fuel that permeated the air.
My hands were covered in the blood of the dying and the dead.
Shattered, I curled up in a corner and tried to rest. Thinking how unlucky I was to be caught up in this unimaginable horror, I closed my eyes and, for the first time since the accident, checked all my senses.
But as I moved my tired muscles and felt my body respond to each of my brain’s commands, I changed my mind. I was, by some miracle, completely unhurt. No one on earth was luckier than me. And for that, I am still daily grateful.
At the time of that fateful accident — Friday, October 13, 1972 — I was a second-year medical student in Montevideo, Uruguay. I was also a rugby fanatic and the boyfriend of a beautiful doctor’s daughter, Lauri Surraco.
Until that moment, my friends and I had been living in a predictable, privileged universe — we were training to be lawyers, engineers, architects.
Our rugby team — veterans from our old school, the Christian Brothers College — had chartered the 45-seater turboprop to carry us, with our families and fans, to a match in Santiago, Chile. We were young, healthy and happy.
But in a split second all our expectations had been ripped apart. We had been cast into a hideous limbo.
That first night seemed to last for ever. Then I woke up thinking I was in the middle of a nightmare, only to find it was real.
What survived of the fuselage lay on its side in the snow, with eight cabin windows turned to the sky and five pressed against the ice below. Loose cables and wires dangled from the ceiling.
Outside was a vast amphitheatre of open space. Argentina, I guessed, lay to the east while a huge, intractable wall of mountains hemmed us in on the western side. Several people had died overnight, including the co-pilot. My friend Nando Parrado, whom we’d thought the previous day was dead, lay in a deep coma. Twelve of the passengers and crew had perished on impact.
But despite our grief and shock, we did not despair. Although we had no radio or phone contact, we firmly believed that our rescue was imminent.
The Chilean authorities knew before the plane had lost contact that we were in the foothills of their country, 100 miles from our destination. And our altimeter read only 7,000ft (we later learned this was wrong — the needle had gone haywire in the crash. In fact our altitude was far higher).
We rounded up whatever food we could find. Although there was very little, we rationed what we found equally, and shared the clothes in the luggage between us.
The worst is behind us, we told ourselves. We must not panic. We must stay strong for those who were seriously injured.
Together we formed an enormous cross in the snow with empty suitcases, and scratched out an SOS with our feet that might be visible from the air. But to our astonishment, no planes came. As night fell, we trudged back to the fuselage.
The next morning we heard a jet flying high overhead, followed by a smaller propeller plane. Everybody swore we saw the first plane dip its wing, a clear message that it had seen us. We jumped and screamed and cried with joy.
But help did not arrive that day, nor the next, nor the next. We lied to ourselves, to let ourselves down gently. It’s not an easy rescue, we told each other; they’ll need helicopters. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll see them.
High above us we could see a commercial flight-path — part of a world that was moving on without us.
Gradually, as the days passed, the fractured cabin ceased to be the wreckage of a plane with a destination and became a refuge.
Of the original 45 people on board, 12 had died in the crash and six more over the next few days. That left 27 of us, huddled inside the cabin. But we were no longer of this world. We had become like creatures from another planet.
Storms in the Andes were keeping us trapped in the fuselage. Our rugby fraternity became a family, caring for each other unconditionally and learning to pool our best ideas.
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?
For a long time we agonised. I went out in the snow and prayed to God for guidance. Without His consent, I felt I would be violating the memory of my friends; that I would be stealing their souls.
We wondered whether we were going mad even to contemplate such a thing. Had we turned into brute savages? Or was this the only sane thing to do? Truly, we were pushing the limits of our fear.
Javier Methol, at 35 the oldest of our group, told us he, too, had prayed for help from above. He said that God told him to think of it like Holy Communion. Javier recited the New Testament verses to us: ‘He who eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood will have eternal life. Take and eat, this is my body.’
Maybe a miracle might occur just in time to avoid what seemed to us a hideous transgression. Never had the consequences of time seemed so gruesome.
But true hunger is atrocious, instinctive, primordial, and God witnessed the groaning of my insides. In time, a rational and loving answer emerged to calm my fears and give me inner peace.
The words that several of us — me included — had said out loud in the aftermath of the crash came back to me: that if we died, the rest could use our bodies to survive.
For me, it was an honour to say that if my heart stopped beating, my arms and legs and muscles could still be part of our communal mission to get off the mountain. I wanted to know I’d still be playing my part.
And now, as a doctor, I cannot help associating that event — using a dead body to continue living — with something that would be realised the world over in the coming decades: organ and tissue transplants.
We were the ones to break the taboo. But the world would break it with us in the years to come, as what was once thought bizarre became a new way to honour the dead.
Gradually, each of us came to our own decision in our own time. And once we had done so, it was irreversible. It was our final goodbye to innocence.
We were never the same again.
I will never forget that first incision nine days after the crash, each man alone with his conscience on that infinite mountain-top, on a day colder and greyer than any before or since.
Four of us — Gustavo, Fito Strauch, my dear friend Daniel Maspons and me — all of us with a razor-blade or shard of glass in his hand, carefully cutting the clothes off a body whose face we could not bear to look at. We laid the thin strips of frozen flesh aside on a piece of sheet metal. Each of us finally consumed our piece when we could bear to.
A day later, on October 23, we heard on our tiny transistor radio that after more than 100 attempts to find us, the search had been called of
We matured fast, even though we had only recently left behind our adolescence. Those of us who were uninjured formed ourselves into reconnaissance parties and ventured out into the treacherous landscape; in part to look for a way out, in part simply to stop ourselves going mad.
Towards the end of the first month, it snowed for days and the world seemed cloaked in grey. We huddled together, listening to the sound of avalanches in the distance.
On October 29, it was my turn to sleep in the best part of the fuselage, near the cockpit away from the opening, alongside Daniel Maspons. Suddenly we heard an immense rumbling sound, like a terrible thunderstorm when it’s right on top of you.
Before I could draw breath to wonder what was happening, I was smacked in the chest by a huge wall of ice and snow that became as hard as cement as it enveloped me. An avalanche. Death, surely, had come for me this time.
I know I passed out. I have no idea for how long. I came round to find my friend Roy Harley’s face in front of mine. He was frantically digging handfuls of snow away from my mouth.
I gasped for breath and struggled out of my icy grave. The fuselage was filled with snow and ice. All of us were suffocating, and soaked.
Suddenly, I remembered Daniel. He had been right next to me. Desperately I clawed through the icy snow, scraping at it until my nails bled.
I dug and dug until I uncovered the face of my boyhood friend. Daniel, who had survived the crash without a scratch; who had set out fearlessly on our toughest hikes to try to find a way out.
I swept the snow away from his face and out of his mouth, and leaned in to listen for his breath. But there was only silence. My beloved friend was dead.
I continued digging until I fell over from exhaustion. One person emerged, then another. Some of them gasped for breath. Others did not.
That night, the worst of my life, we lost eight more of our friends, along with everything that we had managed to construct: hammocks for the injured, the clothes on our backs, the ponchos and blankets we’d made from seat covers.
By the bursts of flickering lighters that sputtered for lack of oxygen, we looked at one another as the reality of the situation dawned on us: we were entombed in an icy sarcophagus, God knows how many feet under snow.
We had no food — even the frozen bodies we were relying on to stay alive had been swept away. Everyone was waiting for someone to do something. Or for no one to do anything and just let the end come.
That’s when I steeled myself to do what needed to be done: to use one of the bodies of the newly dead.
I knew that if I didn’t, it would be the end of us. I had already done things that I never in my darkest nightmares imagined I’d have to do. I think studying medicine helped me to act like a surgeon, who manages to set aside his emotions while opening up a warm body and excising an organ.
And so we took yet another step in the descent towards our ultimate indignity: to eat the body of the person lying next to us. Each of us would have to be stained with this blood if we were to keep the seed of life from withering.
It took us three days to dig our way up to the cockpit. Finally we sat back in the captain’s chair, kicked out the front windscreen and crawled to the surface.
We now knew our only hope of survival was for some of us to make a perilous journey into the unknown.
Our hikes had initially been to help morale. Now they took on a deadly serious purpose: preparing us for the day when some of us would leave, possibly never to return.
On November 17, during a practice expedition, we found the tail section — and with it coats, cigarettes, batteries, a bottle of rum and a kilo of sugar.
I also found my luggage, which was like stumbling across the person I used to be. It was redolent with the smell of my home, and a life before all this.
The discovery of the batteries gave us hope that we could repair the plane’s radio. But it was not to be. All we heard after days of trying was a garbled, hissing static that never became words.
It looked as though Nando, my friend Antonio Vizintin and I would be the ones to go.
And then something surprising happened.
On December 8, we heard on our radio that the search for us had been reinstated. Even if it was only a mission to recover our bodies, we hadn’t been forgotten.
With that kind of news, I was filled with doubt about the wisdom of striking out on our own. With better weather, they might have a good chance of finding us.
Three days later, Gustavo Zerbino came to speak to me privately. ‘Numa is dead,’ he said. ‘And in a couple of days Roy will be, too. If we wait any longer, we’re all going to die.’
Numa Turcatti had been the bravest of the brave. If he had succumbed, then it was only a matter of time before we all followed suit. If we were to survive this tragedy, it was up to us.
I told Gustavo I was ready to start the next day.
I felt like a man condemned to death, hoping against hope for something — anything — to stay his execution.
That night I was unable to close my eyes.
All I could think about, with terror in my head and heart, was the sheer walls of ice that lay between us and salvation.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
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