Seventy-two days. Most people can't imagine surviving seventy-two hours in the snow without a jacket, let alone two and a half months at 11,000 feet. The story of Alive—the shorthand everyone uses for the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571—isn’t just a survival tale. It's a messy, horrifying, and somehow beautiful look at what humans do when the rules of civilization evaporate.
It started with a cloud.
On October 13, 1972, a Fairchild FH-227D was carrying the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile. The pilots made a fatal navigational error. They thought they had cleared the peaks. They hadn't. When the plane clipped a mountain, the wings tore off, and the fuselage slid like a high-speed toboggan down a glacier. Out of 45 people, 12 died initially. More would follow. What remains is a narrative that challenges every moral fiber we have.
The Geography of Despair
The crash site was a place called the Glacier of Tears. It sounds poetic now, but at the time, it was a white hell. You have to understand the physical reality of the Andes in October. It's late spring, but at that altitude, the temperature regularly drops to -30°C. The survivors were wearing sports coats and loafers. No mountain gear. No heavy blankets.
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Nando Parrado, one of the primary figures in the Alive story, spent the first three days in a coma. His skull was fractured. Most people thought he was a goner. When he woke up and realized his mother had died in the crash and his sister was dying in his arms, his reality shifted. That kind of trauma either breaks a person or turns them into steel. Parrado chose steel.
The group tried to stay hopeful. They had a small transistor radio. On day 11, they huddled around it, straining to hear the news through the static. They heard the search had been called off.
Imagine that.
The world had moved on. To the authorities in Uruguay and Chile, they were already ghosts. Roberto Canessa, a medical student at the time, later described this as the moment they realized they had to save themselves. No one was coming. This realization led to the darkest, most discussed aspect of their survival: the decision to eat the bodies of the deceased.
The Choice Nobody Wants to Make
We have to talk about the anthropophagy. People call it "cannibalism," but Canessa and Parrado often push back on that term because it carries a predatory connotation. This was a desperate, communal decision for protein. There was zero food. They had found some chocolate and crackers, but that lasted a few days. Then they ate the stuffing from the seats. Then they tried to eat the leather from suitcases. The chemicals in the tanning process made them sick.
It wasn't a snap decision. It took days of theological and philosophical debate. These were devout Roman Catholics. They compared the act to the Eucharist—the body of Christ. They made a pact: if I die, you have my permission to use my body so that you might live.
Honestly, the way the Alive story is often sensationalized misses the sheer clinical misery of it. They had to use shards of glass to cut frozen flesh. They had to overcome a primal, biological revulsion that most of us will never experience. It wasn’t about being macabre; it was about not starving to death in a freezer.
The Avalanche and the Long Walk
Just when they thought it couldn't get worse, it did. On October 29, an avalanche swept through the fuselage while they slept. It buried them. Eight more people died, suffocated by the snow. For three days, the survivors lived in a cramped, airless pocket inside the buried plane, surrounded by the bodies of their friends who had just perished.
This is where the Alive narrative shifts from a "wait and see" story to an "action" story.
They knew they had to climb out. But where? They thought they were in the Chilean foothills because of what the pilots said before they died. They were wrong. They were deep in the heart of the mountains.
Canessa, Parrado, and Vizintín were chosen to trek out. They spent weeks "training" and sewing together a sleeping bag made from the plane's insulation. It was their only hope against the night temperatures. On December 12, they started walking. Vizintín eventually headed back to the fuselage to save rations, leaving Parrado and Canessa to face the peaks alone.
They climbed a 15,000-foot mountain with no equipment. When Parrado reached the top, he didn't see the green valleys of Chile. He saw more mountains. Peaks as far as the eye could see. Most people would have sat down and died right there. Parrado just turned to Canessa and said, "We may be walking to our deaths, but I’d rather walk to meet my death than wait for it to come to me."
Ten Days of Walking
They walked for ten days. Their bodies were decaying. They were suffering from altitude sickness, frostbite, and extreme malnutrition. Finally, the snow began to thin. They saw a river. They saw a cow. And eventually, across a rushing river, they saw a man on horseback: Sergio Catalán.
Parrado couldn't scream over the roar of the water. He threw a rock across the river with a note tied to it. The note, now famous in Uruguayan history, simply stated that he had come from a plane that crashed in the mountains and that 14 others were still up there.
The rescue was a media circus. The survivors were initially hailed as heroes, then criticized when the truth about how they survived surfaced. But the Catholic Church eventually stepped in, stating they had committed no sin given the circumstances of "extreme necessity."
Why This Story Still Sticks
The Alive story persists because it forces us to ask: What would I do? It’s not just about the gore or the tragedy. It’s about the organizational structure they built. They had a "government." They had people responsible for melting snow for water, people for cleaning the fuselage, and people for medical care. They survived because they didn't descend into anarchy.
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Even today, survivors like Canessa and Parrado give talks around the world. Canessa became a renowned pediatric cardiologist. He often says that his experience in the Andes taught him that the impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet.
There's a reason why J.A. Bayona’s recent film Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) resonated so deeply, even decades after the original Alive book by Piers Paul Read was published. The new film shifted the focus back to the victims—the ones who didn't make it out—honoring their "contribution" to the survival of the others. It reframed the narrative from a triumph of the will to a communal sacrifice.
Lessons from the Glacier
If you’re looking for a takeaway from the Alive saga, it isn’t "don't fly over the Andes." It's more about the human capacity for adaptation.
- Group Cohesion is Everything: In extreme stress, the "lone wolf" dies. The survivors of Flight 571 functioned as a single organism.
- The Power of Small Goals: They didn't focus on the 72 days. They focused on surviving the next hour, then the next night.
- Acceptance of Reality: They didn't waste energy wishing they weren't there. Once the radio told them the search was off, they accepted their new, brutal reality and acted accordingly.
Actionable Takeaways for Resilience
You likely won't be stranded on a glacier, but the psychological framework used by the survivors applies to any high-stakes crisis:
- Audit your resources immediately. When things go wrong, stop and look at exactly what you have—not what you wish you had. The survivors used every scrap of the plane, from the seat covers to the insulation.
- Establish a routine. Even in the fuselage, they had "jobs." Routine fends off the paralysis of despair. It keeps the brain occupied.
- Find your "Why." For Parrado, it was the thought of his father losing his entire family. That one thought drove him over a 15,000-foot mountain.
- Permit yourself to pivot. If your current strategy isn't working (like waiting for rescue), you have to be willing to take a massive, calculated risk (the trek).
The story of the Andes survivors remains the gold standard for human endurance. It’s a reminder that the line between life and death is often thin, and moving across it requires more than just luck—it requires a refusal to quit. For anyone interested in the deeper details, Roberto Canessa’s book I Had to Survive offers a medical and spiritual perspective that fills in the gaps most movies leave out. If you want the gritty, day-by-day technicalities, Piers Paul Read's original Alive remains the definitive journalistic account.
Understand the history, but more importantly, understand the psychological resilience it proves we all possess. We are capable of far more than we think when the floor drops out.