Review
Many of us think miracle never happens. Everything is up to us. Many of us are agnostic. It is a story dedicated to them. It’s the story of the Andes Survivors; popularized by the book “Alive” and the 1993 film of the same name.
“Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, also known as the Miracle in the Andes, was a chartered flight carrying 45 people, including a rugby team and their friends, family and associates that crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972. The last of the 16 survivors were rescued on December 23, 1972On Friday the 13th of October, 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force twin turboprop Fairchild FH-227D was flying over the Andes carrying members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team from Montevideo, Uruguay, to play a match in Santiago, Chile.
Due to bad weather and limitations of the airplane, the flight could not fly over the Andes Mountains and instead had to proceed through one of the “passes” through the mountains, to reach Chile. The pilots misjudged their position and, thinking they were at the pass, flew instead into a mountain, leading to a controlled flight into terrain. But the plane did not smash head long into the mountain. In a last ditch effort to gain altitude and clear the top of the mountain, the pilots clipped the peak at 4,200 meters (13,800 ft), neatly severing the right wing, which was thrown back with such force that it cut off the tail, leaving a gaping hole in the rear of the fuselage. The plane then clipped a second peak, which severed the left wing and left the plane as just a fuselage flying through the air. The fuselage hit the ground and slid down a steep mountain slope before finally coming to rest in a snow bank.
Of the 45 people on the plane, 12 died in the crash or shortly thereafter; another five had died by the next morning, and one more succumbed to injuries on the eighth day. The remaining 27 faced severe difficulties in surviving high in the freezing mountains. The survivors had little food and no source of heat in the harsh conditions, at over 3,600 meters (11,800 ft) altitude. Faced with starvation and radio news reports that the search for them had been abandoned, the survivors fed on the dead passengers who had been preserved in the snow. Rescuers did not learn of the survivors until 72 days after the crash, when passengers Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, after a 12-day trek across the Andes, found a Chilean huaso, who gave them food and then alerted authorities about the existence of the other survivors. Only sixteen would survive. Their survival in the high mountains of the Andes and final rescue just before Christmas 1972 would become known as The Miracle in the Andes.”
