Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  The flight plan filed by Lagurara was to take the Fairchild direct from Montevideo to Santiago by way of Buenos Aires and Mendoza, a distance of around nine hundred miles. The Fairchild cruised at about 240 knots; it would therefore take them approximately four hours, the last half hour of which would be over the Andes. By leaving at eight, however, the pilots expected to reach the mountains before noon and avoid the dangerous postmeridianal turbulence. All the same, they worried about the crossing, because the Andes, though less than a hundred miles wide, rise to an average height of 13,000 feet, with peaks as high as 20,000 feet; one mountain, Aconcagua, which lies between Mendoza and Santiago, rises to 22,834 feet, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere and only about 6,000 feet short of Mount Everest.

  The highest the Fairchild could fly was 22,500 feet. It therefore had to fly through a pass in the Andes where the mountains rose to a lesser height. When visibility was good there was a choice of four – Juncal, the most direct route from Mendoza to Santiago, Nieves, Alvarado, or Planchon. If visibility was poor and the pilots had to fly on instruments, the Fairchild would have to go through Planchon, a hundred miles or so south of Mendoza, because Juncal had a minimum ceiling of 26,000 feet, and Nieves and Alvarado had no radio beacons. The danger was not just that a plane might crash into a mountain. The weather in the Andes was subject to every kind of treachery. From the east, hot currents of air rose to meet the icy atmosphere at the snow line, which lay at between 14,000 and 16,000 feet. At the same time, the cyclonic winds which blew in from the Pacific roared up the valleys from the west and grappled in their turn with the hot and cold currents from the other side. If a plane was caught in such turbulence, it could be blown around like a leaf in a gutter. It was with these considerations in mind that Lagurara made contact with ground control at Mendoza.

  There was no overt sign of anxiety in the passenger compartment. The boys talked, laughed, read comics, and played cards. Marcelo Pérez discussed rugby with members of the team; Susana Parrado sat next to her mother, who handed out sweets to the boys around her. Behind them sat Nando Parrado with his greatest friend, Panchito Abal.

  These two boys were famous as inseparable friends. They were both the sons of businessmen and both worked in their fathers’ firms, Parrado marketing nuts and bolts, Abal in tobacco. On the surface it was an unequal friendship. Abal – handsome, charming and rich – was one of the best rugby players in Uruguay and played for the Old Christians as a wing three-quarter; whereas Parrado was awkward, shy, and, though pleasant-looking, not particularly attractive. He played in the second line of the scrum.

  The interests they had in common, besides rugby and business, were cars and girls, and it was this which had gained them the reputation of playboys. Cars are inordinately expensive in Uruguay, and both had one – Parrado a Renault 4 and Abal a Mini-Cooper. Both had motorcycles, too, which they took to Punta del Este and rode along the beaches with a girl on the pillion. Here again, their relationship seemed unequal, for while there was hardly a girl in Uruguay who did not want to be seen with Abal, a date with Parrado was not so popular. He lacked Abal’s glamour and easy charm; moreoever, he was neither more nor less than what he seemed to be. Abal, on the other hand, gave the impression that his gaiety and his easy, charming manner concealed a profound and mysterious melancholy which, together with an occasional expression of deep boredom, only added to his allure. Abal, in his turn, repaid the admiration of his female admirers with his time. His size, strength and skill enabled him to skip some of the training that was essential for other members of the team, and what energies he saved from rugby were dedicated to these pretty girls, to cars and motorcycles, to elegant clothes for himself, and to his friendship with Parrado.

  Parrado had one advantage over Abal for which the latter would willingly have exchanged all the others: he came from a happy, united family. Abal’s parents were divorced. Both had been married before; both had had children by their previous marriages. His mother was much younger than his father, but it was with his father, who was now over seventy, that Abal had chosen to live. The divorce, however, had deeply injured him. His Byronic melancholy was not just an affectation.

  The plane flew on over the endless pampas of Argentina. Those by the windows could see the geometric patches of green where crops had been planted amid the prairie and, every now and then, the squares of wood plantations, or small houses with trees planted around them. Then slowly the ground beneath them changed in appearance from a vast paving of green to the more arid ground at the foothills of the Sierras which rose to their right. The grass gave way to scrub and the cultivated land clung only to little spots which were artesian wells.

  Suddenly they saw the Andes rising before them, a dramatic and apparently impassable wall with snow-clad peaks like the teeth of a giant saw. The sight of this, the cordillera, would have been enough to sober the most experienced traveller, let alone these young Uruguayans, most of whom had never seen mountains higher than the little hills which lie between Montevideo and Punta del Este. As they steeled themselves for the awesome sight of some of the highest mountains in the world, the steward, Ramírez, suddenly came out of the pilot’s cabin and announced over a loudspeaker that weather conditions made it impossible to cross the cordillera. They were going to land in Mendoza and wait until the weather improved.

  A groan of disappointment went up from the boys in the passenger compartment. As it was, they had only five days to spend in Chile and they did not want to waste one of them – or any of their precious US dollars – in Argentina. However, since there was no way around the Andes, which run from one end of the South American continent to the other, there was nothing to be done, so they fastened their seat belts and sat tight as the Fairchild made a particularly rough landing at Mendoza airport.

  When it had come to a halt by the airport building and Ferradas emerged from the pilot’s cabin, a wing three-quarter on the team named Roberto Canessa somewhat impudently congratulated him on the landing.

  ‘Don’t congratulate me,’ said Ferradas. ‘Lagurara deserves the praise.’

  ‘And when are we going to Chile?’ another boy asked.

  The colonel shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. We’ll see what happens to the weather.’

  3

  The boys followed the pilots and crew out of the plane and trooped across the tarmac to the customs control, the mountains of the pre-cordillera brooding over them like an immense cliff face. Everything else was dwarfed – the buildings, the oil tanks, and the trees. The boys were undaunted. Not even the cordillera or the distasteful business of buying Argentinian pesos could suppress their high spirits. They left the airport and divided up into groups to take a bus or a taxi into town or to hitch a ride on some passing lorry.

  It was lunchtime and the boys were hungry. They had either had an early breakfast or no breakfast at all, and no food to speak of was carried on the Fairchild. A group of the younger ones made straight for a nearby restaurant, which they found was owned by an expatriate Uruguayan who would not let them pay for their meal.

  Others went off in search of a cheap hotel and, having checked in, went out into the streets again to take a look around. Impatient as they were to get to Chile, they could not help but enjoy Mendoza. One of the oldest cities in Argentina, having been founded by the Spanish in 1561, it retained much of the grace and charm of the colonial period. Its streets were wide and lined with trees. The air, even so early in spring, was warm and dry that day, and scented with the new blossoms of the flowers planted in the public gardens. The streets were lined with pleasant shops, cafés and restaurants, and outside the city were acres of vineyards producing some of the best wine in South America.

  The Parrados, Abal, Señora Mariani, and the other two middle-aged couples booked themselves into one of the better hotels but went their different ways after lunch. Parrado and Abal found a motor race outside the city and in the evening joined Marcelo Pérez to see Barbra Streisand in What’s Up, Doc?
The younger boys met up with a group of Argentinian girls who were on a graduation holiday and took them dancing. Some did not get back to their hotels until four in the morning.

  As a result, they slept late the next day. No word came from the crew that they should go to the airport, so once again they went wandering around the streets of Mendoza. One of the youngest boys, Carlitos Páez, who was something of a hypochondriac, stocked up on aspirins and Alka Seltzer. Others used the last of their Argentinian money to buy chocolate, nougat, and cartridges of butane gas to refill their lighters. Nando Parrado bought a little pair of red shoes for his older sister’s baby, and his mother bought small bottles of rum and liqueur for friends in Chile. She gave them to Nando to carry, and he stuffed them into an airline bag among his rugby clothes.

  Two of the medical students, Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino, went to a café where tables and chairs were set out on the pavement of a tree-lined boulevard. There they ordered a breakfast of peach juice, croissants, and café au lait.

  A short time later, as they sat drinking their coffee, they saw their captain, Marcelo Pérez, and the two pilots walking towards them.

  ‘Hey!’ they shouted to Colonel Ferradas. ‘Can we leave now?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ferradas.

  ‘Are you cowards or what?’ asked Canessa, who was nicknamed Muscles because of his stubborn character.

  Ferradas, recognizing the high-pitched voice which had ‘congratulated’ him on the landing the day before, looked momentarily annoyed. ‘Do you want your parents to read in the papers that forty-five Uruguayans are lost in the cordillera?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Zerbino. ‘I want them to read, “Forty-five Uruguayans cross the cordillera at all costs”.’

  Ferradas and Lagurara laughed and walked on. They were placed in an awkward situation, not so much by the boys’ taunts as by the dilemma they faced. The meteorological reports were that the weather was improving over the Andes. The pass at Juncal was still closed to the Fairchild, but there was an excellent chance that by the early afternoon Planchon would be clear. It would mean crossing the Andes at a time of day that was normally considered hazardous, but they were confident that they could fly above the turbulence. The only alternative was to return to Montevideo (because it was against regulations for a military aircraft of a foreign power to remain for more than twenty-four hours on Argentinian soil), which would not only disappoint the Old Christians but mean a serious loss of revenue for the impoverished Uruguayan Air Force. They therefore passed the word around through Marcelo Pérez that their passengers should report to the airport at one o’clock.

  The passengers did as they had been told, but when they arrived they found no sign of the Uruguayan crew or the Argentinian officials who would have to check their luggage and passports. The boys fooled around while they waited, taking photographs, weighing themselves, frightening one another with the thought that it was Friday the thirteenth, and teasing Señora Parrado for taking a travelling rug to Chile in the spring. Then a cry went up. Ferradas and Lagurara had come into the airport building, both laden with large bottles of Mendoza wine. The boys began to tease them. ‘Drunks!’ shouted one; ‘Smugglers!’ shouted another; and the insolent Canessa said in a penetrating sneer, ‘Just look what kind of pilots we’ve got!’

  Ferradas and Lagurara seemed a little disconcerted by the jeering crowd of boys. There was a latent defensiveness about them, partly because they were still undecided about what they should do and afraid that their caution would be mistaken for incompetence. Just at that moment, however, another plane landed at the airport. It was an old cargo plane which made a lot of noise and emitted spurts of smoke from its engines as it taxied over the tarmac, but when its pilot entered the airport building Ferradas approached him and asked for his advice.

  The pilot had just come from Santiago and he reported that, though the air turbulence was strong, it should not prove a problem for the Fairchild, which had, after all, the most up-to-date navigational equipment. Indeed, this pilot even suggested that they take the direct route to Santiago over the Juncal Pass, which would reduce the journey to less than 150 miles.

  Ferradas decided that they would go – not by the Juncal Pass but by the safer southerly route through the Pass of Planchon. A cheer went up from the boys when this was announced, though they still had to wait for the Argentinian officials to check their passports and let them through to the Fairchild.

  In the meantime, they watched the dilapidated cargo plane take off again with the same noise and smoke as before. As it did so, two of the Old Christians turned to two Argentinian girls, who had gone out with them the night before and had now come to see them off, saying, ‘Now we know the kind of planes they have in Argentina.’

  ‘At least it got over the Andes,’ one of the girls replied tartly, ‘which is more than yours will.’

  4

  The co-pilot, Lagurara, was again at the controls of the Fairchild as it took off from Mendoza airport at eighteen minutes past two, local time. He set his course for Chilecito and then Malargüe, a small town on the Argentine side of the Planchon Pass. The plane climbed to 18,000 feet and flew with a tail wind of between 20 and 60 knots.

  The land beneath them was sparse and arid, marked by river beds and salt lakes which bore the tracery of bulldozers. To the right rose the cordillera, a curtain of barren rock reaching towards the sky. If the plain below was mostly in-infertile, these mountains were a desert. The brown, grey and yellow rock was untouched by even the smallest trace of vegetation, for their height sheltered the mountains on this side from the rain which was blown in from the Pacific on the western side of the range. Here, on the Argentinian side, the soil which lay between the folds and cracks of the mountains was no more than volcanic dust. There were no trees, no scrub, no grass. Nothing broke the monotonous ascent of these brittle mountains except the snow. Above 13,000 feet it was perpetual, but at this time of year it lay at much lower altitudes, softening the lines of the mountains and piling up in the valleys to a depth of more than a hundred feet.

  The Fairchild was equipped not only with an ADF (Automatic Direction Finder) radio compass but also with the more modern VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Range). It was therefore a matter of routine to tune to the radio beacon at Malargüe, which was blocked at 15.08 hours. Still flying at 18,000 feet, the plane now turned to fly over the cordillera along air lane G17. Lagurara estimated Planchon – the point in the middle of the mountains where he passed from Air Traffic Control in Mendoza to that in Santiago – at 15.21 hours. As he flew into the mountains, however, a blanket of cloud obscured his vision of the ground beneath. This was no cause for concern. Visibility above the clouds was good, and with the ground of the high cordillera covered with snow, there would, in any case, have been nothing by which they could have identified Planchon. Only one significant change had taken place: the moderate tail wind had now changed to a strong head wind. The ground speed of the plane had therefore been reduced from 210 to 180 knots.

  At 15.21 Lagurara radioed Air Traffic Control in Santiago to say that he was over the Pass of Planchon and estimated to reach Curicó – the small town in Chile on the western side of the Andes – at 15.32. Then, only three minutes later, the Fairchild once again made contact with Santiago and reported ‘checking Curicó and heading toward Maipu’. The plane turned at right angles to its previous course and headed north. The control tower in Santiago, accepting Lagurara at his word, authorized him to bring the plane down to 10,000 feet as he came towards the airport of Pudahuel. At 15.30 Santiago checked the level of the Fairchild. It reported ‘level 150’, which meant that Lagurara had already brought the plane down 3,000 feet. At this altitude it entered a cloud and began to jump and shake in the different currents of air. Lagurara switched on the sign in the passenger cabin which ordered passengers to fasten their safety belts and to stop smoking. He then turned to ask the steward Ramírez, who had brought Ferradas a gourd filled with maté, the bitter tea of South
America, to return to the galley and make sure that the unruly passengers did as they were told.

  Inside the passenger compartment there was a holiday atmosphere. Several of the boys were walking up and down the aisle, peering out of the small windows to try and catch a glimpse of the mountains through a gap in the clouds. They were all in high spirits; they had their rugby ball with them, and some were throwing it up and down the passenger cabin over their heads. At the back of the plane a group was playing cards, and farther back still, by the galley, the steward and the navigator, Martínez, had been playing a game of truco, a kind of whist. As the steward made his way back from the cockpit to resume the game, he told the boys still standing in the aisle to sit down.

  ‘There’s bad weather ahead,’ he said. ‘The plane’s going to dance a little, but don’t worry. We’re in touch with Santiago. We’ll be landing soon.’

  As he approached the galley he told four of the boys at the back to move forward. Then he sat down with the navigator and took up his hand.

  As the plane entered another cloud bank it began to shake and lurch in a manner which alarmed many of the passengers. There were one or two practical jokes to hide this nervousness. One of the boys took hold of the microphone at the back of the plane and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please put on your parachutes. We are about to land in the cordillera.’

  His audience was not amused, because just at that moment the plane hit an air pocket and plummeted several hundred feet. Roberto Canessa, for example, feeling alarmed, turned to Señora Nicola, who sat with her husband across the aisle, and asked her if she was afraid.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I am.’

  Behind them a group of boys started to chant ‘Conga, conga, conga,’ and Canessa, with a show of courage, took a rugby ball which he had in his hands and threw it to Dr Nicola, who in his turn threw it back down the cabin.