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[music playing]
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
FERNANDO PARRADO : My name is Nando Parrado.
I was one of the 16 survivors of Flight 571
which crashed in the Andes Mountains
on Friday the 13th of October 1972.
I knew a plane cannot fly that close to the mountains,
and I looked towards my mother, and that was a moment
of impact.
[plane crashing]
I was on a very deep coma, so you wake up very slowly.
And I woke up in hell.
We waited for a rescue but it didn't come.
Our plane that crashes in the middle of the mountains
in this snow season, there's no way people can survive.
And after a week, after 10 days, after three weeks,
after a month of the two months, who would believe
there was people alive?
The decision of eating the dead bodies of our friends
started to creep into our minds at the same time,
you know, because we all had the same fear, the same lack
of hope, the same confirmation that we were dead.
And I decided I was going to die,
but I was going to die trying.
[music playing]
Initially, the trip was planned for four days.
We would leave on Thursday and we would come back on Monday
morning.
You are young, you don't have that much money,
and the easiest way and the cheapest one
was to charter an Air Force plane.
The night before the plane left for Santiago,
the captain of the team told us that there were still 10 seats
available on the airplane.
And if anyone who wanted to bring family or friends,
they could go for free.
So I jumped from my seat and I phoned my mother and said,
mom, prepare a bag.
You're going to Chile tomorrow, and tell Susy--
so she was my sister-- that she's going, too.
Susy, 17 years old, I remember, and she always
was running around my rugby teammates because, you know,
the rugby players.
That's how simply it happened.
I wanted to give them a present of love
to invite them to go to Chile with us.
They would shop and have a nice time,
we would come back on Monday.
But it never happened like that.
We left on Thursday but when the plane came close to the Andes,
the weather was not very good so it
had to land in Mendoza, the last city in Argentina
before the Andes.
And we had to wait for the weather
to be better so that the plane could cross.
So we had to sleep in Mendoza that night.
And the next morning, we went to the airport
and we boarded the plane and we left finally on Friday morning
for Santiago.
Nothing made us think or believe that something terrible going
to happen.
Friday the 13th, I'm not a superstitious person
and I don't care about that.
But I know, Friday the 13th and I would crash on that day.
You know, some guys think about it, some don't.
Obviously, the pilot didn't think about it too much.
How could a pilot make such a big mistake?
A pilot with experience.
RAND PECK: The captain on this flight
was a Uruguayan Air Force colonel,
and that implies that he was an experienced pilot.
I know that he had 29 crossings of the Andes, which is a lot.
However his total time is total flight experience
was in the range of 5,200 hours.
And by today's standards, 5,200 hours is not a lot of time.
ENRIQUE CROSA THROUGH INTERPRETER:
The training by the crew was done according
to international standards.
It was in a good condition to fly that plane,
without any problems.
RAND PECK: The Fairchild had a max takeoff weight of 45,000
pounds and carried anywhere between 45 and 50 passengers.
The engines that it had were two Rolls-Royce Dart 7 engines
which are approximately 1,725 shaft horsepower each.
The aircraft struggled because it was under-powered,
and we pretty much referred to it as a let slip.
GARY ORLANDO: Of the 78 Fairchild 227's built,
23 crashed, and there were a total of 393 fatalities.
A third of them have been involved in accidents, which
equates to not a very good safety record.
FERNANDO PARRADO : At the time, we didn't know the safety
record of that model was absolutely horrible.
Had we known that, we would have never gotten to that airplane.
RAND PECK: After the take off from Mendoza,
the captain elected to fly South and make a turn
towards the Planchon Pass.
The reason he elected to do this is
because he could fly the aircraft through a Pass
and at a lower altitude.
If he had led to do strictly go over the Andes,
he would have had to go a lot higher, which would have been
a lot more stressful on this aircraft.
It has a hard enough time getting up
to 15,000 or 16,000 feet, let alone
what it would have needed to get over the Andes without going
through a Pass.
RICARDO PEÑA: The Andes Mountains rise so abruptly that
they create very serious storms.
The jet stream is coming from the Pacific.
All this moist air gets funneled by the mountains.
That speeds up winds and creates precipitation, creates clouds.
And so the storms that can be formed by the Andes
can be very fierce.
FERNANDO PARRADO : This was a team of friends,
a team of young people flying to have a fantastic fun weekend.
So the mood in the airplane was absolutely happy.
I remember people laughing, people talking, you know,
sitting, kneeling down on the seats
and looking back and talking with the guys.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
We were all singing.
We were all super happy throwing the ball
from one side to the other.
It was quite a fun atmosphere.
FERNANDO PARRADO : Initially, I sat on the window.
But Panchito Abal was my best friend,
who was like my brother, and he said, OK, you have been
for a long time on the window.
Let me look down.
It's easier for me if I'm on the window to look out.
So we changed seats.
He sat on the window, he sat on the aisle.
And that's one of those moments in life
that without thinking will decide who would live
and who would die, you know.
RICARDO PEÑA: There was a cloud cover on the mountains so they
have to cross the Andes to Curico.
And they radio Santiago, we are on Curico,
and we want permission to turn north, and then
fly north to Santiago.
MAN ON RADIO: [non-english speech]
EDWARD C. RODE THROUGH INTERPRETER: The Fairchild was
expected to arrive at Curico at 3:33 PM,
but it reported that it was over Curico at 3:24.
That distance is usually covered in 11 minutes,
and they reported that they covered it in three minutes.
Surely, the plane was still in the middle of the mountains.
RICARDO PEÑA: So the pilots obviously made a mistake
at some point, calculation.
So actually, they're right in the middle of the range
and they're thinking they're already past it.
He makes the unexplained and catastrophic decision
of turning north into the Andes.
This changes the fate of all the passengers in the plane.
So he decided to descend and then
as it was all covered by clouds, he
didn't see that the mountains were under the clouds.
RAND PECK: When a pilot gets into a position where he is not
where he expects to be or not where he thinks he is,
in order to get out of that situation,
he has to convince himself that he's made a mistake.
And it is a different mindset, you have to now think
that I've made a mistake, how am I going to get out of this?
ENRIQUE CROSA THROUGH INTERPRETER:
The cause of the accident was clearly
human error, fault of the crew.
FERNANDO PARRADO : We started to get into some light--
not very heavy-- turbulence, you know.
The plane start to shake a little.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
The flight attendant came out into the cabin
and said, "put your seatbelts on because the plane is going
to dance a little bit."
FERNANDO PARRADO : And then we got into a little bit heavier
turbulence and the mood changed a little bit.
Nobody was throwing balls, you know,
everybody was sitting on the seat
with the seat belt fastened.
RICARDO PEÑA: They head down through the clouds and they
think they're descending into Chile.
And of course, as you get closer to the mountains,
there's the turbulence of all the wind currents that create--
that the mountains create, so they start shaking.
They come from off the cloud cover
and realize that they're completely surrounded by rocks
and mountains.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
There was a feeling of fear, and the fear
transformed into panic.
We felt the acceleration of the engine.
FERNANDO PARRADO : I only had about five or six or seven
seconds to understand that there was something wrong,
that we were going to crash.
[airplane roaring]
[airplane crashing]
The last image that I had is the top of the airplane,
the roof over my head opened and I died.
MAN ON RADIO: [non-english speech]
[airplane crashing]
ROBERTO CANESSA: The plane begins sliding down
at a tremendous speed.
And I was waiting for it to slam against the mountain
but it stopped.
[airplane crashing]
And when it stopped, I thought, "I'm alive."
[music playing]
RICARDO PEÑA: I've stood on the impact and I realized that
there's a saddle there.
And that the pilots must have seen that saddle
and gone for it to try to overcome the mountains.
To the left, a little to the left or a little to the right,
they would have hit cliffs and the plane
would have disintegrated.
PIERS PAUL READ: It was an extraordinary piece of luck,
I would say, that the plane didn't disintegrate
all together when it hit the mountain.
But really, it clipped off the back of it.
And then the front toboggan down the mountain
and didn't hit any--
I mean, that was astonishing.
The fuselage ended up landing on this very steep gully.
It was all covered in snow, luckily
for them, which allowed the fuselage to slide down, make
a couple of turns that are just a natural fall line,
and lead them all the way to the bottom of the glacier.
It was an extremely lucky situation.
PIERS PAUL READ: I just think one must be careful when one
uses the word miraculous.
I mean, you've got to think of the people who didn't make it
and who died and indeed who were eaten.
I mean, you know, it obviously wasn't
miraculous to the parents of those boys.
RICARDO PEÑA: This is one of the seat armrests and I found it
high on the mountain.
This belonged obviously to one of the seats that flew out
the back of the fuselage.
It was obviously very chilling to think that somebody
was riding on that seat.
This is testament to a very tragic moment.
[music playing]
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER: None of us
were familiar with snow.
We were like little boys.
In Uruguay, the maximum altitude is 500 meters
so we knew nothing.
It was a disaster.
Dead people, injured people, people with broken legs.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
Immediately after the plane crashed,
we went about attending to the wounded.
I went over to Nando's mother.
I touched her and she was dead.
ROBERTO CANESSA: She was like wrapped
around a seat in a position that was sure that she was not
alive.
EDUARDO STRAUCH: Nando's condition for us,
he was a dead body.
ROBERTO CANESSA: He had flown from the back seat
to the front seat and his face was very swollen.
And I could barely know whom he was.
EDUARDO STRAUCH: We moved Nando's body near the outside
of the fuselage to make space for us who
survived the accident.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER: The co-pilot
was in a lot of pain.
And he asked us to bring him the revolver in order
to kill himself because he was suffering so much.
ROBERTO CANESSA: Someone said that he was alive
and I realized that he was the key man that could tell us
where we were, what was our location.
He was completely trapped so it was impossible to get him out.
RICARDO PEÑA: Before the pilot dies, they hear him saying,
"we passed Curico, we passed Curico."
The pilot was in shock.
He probably realized that he had made a mistake
but he's telling himself, "but how can this be?"
ROBERTO CANESSA: I remember very vividly that he said,
"we passed Curico.
We passed Curico."
And there was a map there and we begin looking at the map,
and Curico was both on the Chilean side very,
very clearly.
RICARDO PEÑA: So the survivors are thinking this is the only
reliable information we have from somebody who's supposed
to know about this.
So if we passed Curico, that means
we are on the western edge of the Andes.
[music playing]
You find yourself in a glaciated valley, 12,000 feet
in the middle of the Andes.
It's still today is a very remote place.
It's like stepping into a giant freezer,
this valley surrounded by peaks on three sides
and kind of open to the east.
The mountains around you are peaks that are 14,000, 15,000,
16,000 feet high.
To the east, you have El Sosneado,
a volcano that's 18,000 feet.
Very sheer, steep walls.
ERIC JOHNSON: This party immediately
had to protect themselves from the elements, or all of them
may not have survived the first night or two.
And they're put instantly into a very high altitude environment
where now they have to start a very quickly adjusting
to the elevation.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER: The first night
was horrible because the sun set at 4:00 in the afternoon.
And we had to wait about 15 hours for the sun
to come up again.
ERIC JOHNSON: They quickly had to decide how they're going
to survive the first night.
Sharing warmth amongst themselves
was probably the most important thing
that they could have done.
[music playing]
You're in this expectation that you're going to be rescued,
and hopes are high, and you're going to do everything you can
to survive those first few days until the helicopters come
over the mountain and pick you up.
And then they don't.
[music playing]
And then friends around you die.
EDUARDO STRAUCH: We move all the dead body
to the outside of the fuselage so we have more space.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
After the plane crashed and we didn't have any food,
we shared a few little cups of liquor, some little chocolates,
and that was all we had.
[music playing]
Nando, Nando.
CONRADO J. ESTOL: The person had an accident
like the one Nando had, the treatment we would do nowadays
in the 21st century actually exactly what nature did
to Nando with total serendipity in 1972.
It was recently proven that low temperature based hypothermia
is one of the only effective neuroprotectants.
That is something to protect an injured brain.
The fact that Nando was considered dead
and was truly seriously ill and dead bodies close
to the entrance and coldest part of the fuselage
probably extended a significantly protective effect
of his injured brain.
Based on the great paradox, the accident
itself is what probably kept Nando alive.
FERNANDO PARRADO : The first things that I started seeing
were the eyes and the faces of my friends who were very close
to me, looking to me, and speaking, "Nando, we crashed.
Can you hear me?
Can you listen?
Can you hear?
We crashed."
I remember Nando saying the first words,
asking about his mother and his sister.
FERNANDO PARRADO : They said your mother is dead,
and so she's wounded, she's hurt.
My mind discarded in that moment my mother.
I mean, she's dead.
I can't do anything for her so I focused on my sister
and I crawled to where she was.
ROBERTO CANESSA: He was very devoted to her
and was trying to do his best but there
was very little to do.
[music playing]
FERNANDO PARRADO : The first time I got out of there,
I was shocked at the sheer majesty and size of the place
where we were.
Everything was white, white, white, white.
And it was cold and it was huge and silent.
At an altitude of 11,000, 12,000, 14,000 feet,
there's absolutely nothing.
There's ice, snow, and black rocks.
That's all.
There's nothing that can provide any sort of food or nutrition.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Obviously, we waited for a rescue
from the first, second, third, fourth day, but it didn't come.
ENRIQUE CROSA THROUGH INTERPRETER:
We arrived in Chile and they divided the search area
between the Chilean Air Force, the Argentinean Air
Force, and us.
And we performed a series of flights over the Andes
from north to south, something we had never done before,
and we saw absolutely nothing.
[music playing]
CARLOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER: It will be a little crazy
to assume that your son had survived.
The important thing for me was the search.
CARLOS VERGINELLA THROUGH INTERPRETER:
It was very sad the stage we lived through
and we didn't know anything.
I was one of those who firmly believed that none had survived
the Andes.
GRACIELA PARRADO: My heart told me that they were dead.
FERNANDO PARRADO : The last hours that I spent with
my sister, with Susy, the only thing I could do was to hold
her.
We didn't have any medicines.
We didn't have anything.
She was very badly hurt, injured internally.
I stayed with her the whole night.
And I think that she was aware that I was there.
She couldn't speak.
She only looked at me with her beautiful eyes
and she died in my arms that night.
[music playing]
At least I'm happy that she passed away with me, you know,
not alone.
[music playing]
The real hope died on the 10th day
when we listened on that small transistor radio
that we had that the rescue had been abandoned.
And before the 10th day, we had this glimpse of hope.
And after that, hope was non-existent,
hope only prolonged the suffering.
The hope absolutely went away.
[music playing]
I said, Nando, there isn't anything left in the storage
compartments where we kept the chocolates and the can
of sardines that we had.
And Nando looked me in the eye and said, Carlitos,
I want to eat the pilot.
[music playing]
FERNANDO PARRADO : The struggle to survive was so strong,
and the fear, and the waiting for the helicopters,
and fighting the cold and the thirst, and the stress,
and helping other guys.
You know, days went by and I never felt pain in my stomach
or anything like that.
I was hungry but I don't remember having any pain.
ERIC JOHNSON: When people are in a starvation mode, what happens
is we start taking all our food supplies from our liver.
The next thing to go is typically muscle, and then
our adipose tissue, our fatty tissue,
and then we start digesting our internal organs.
That's really what happens as people starve.
They had to have a food source.
You can survive only a few days without water,
they had kind of solved that problem.
[music playing]
But you can only survive in that kind of environment,
you know, from days to weeks without some kind of food.
FERNANDO PARRADO : When you're abandoned,
there's nothing at the altitude.
You look into any item that could be edible, you know.
And we had read so many times about history and explorers who
were without food and they tried to eat
their shoes and their suitcases and leather straps.
And we tried.
We tasted pieces of leather, you know, from suitcases and things
like that.
They're not edible.
They're chemically treated.
They would do much more harm so there was absolutely nothing.
You cannot eat foam from the cushions.
You cannot eat plastic.
When rescue is abandoned, you know that you have to eat.
The chocolates are gone, and if you want to survive
and the survival instinct is probably the strongest instinct
on any human being.
It brings you to a different state of mind.
The decision of eating the dead bodies of our friends
started to creep into our minds at the same time,
you know, because we all had the same fear, the same lack
of hope, the same confirmation that we were dead,
that we were condemned, no rescue,
we're abandoned to our own luck.
On the same day, three or four or five guys
started to speak about the same thing.
I spoke it with Carlitos.
I don't remember if I was the first one or not,
but you know, five, six hours later,
everybody was speaking about the same subject.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
I said, Adolfo, Nando is crazy.
He wants to eat the pilot.
And Adolfo told me, he's not that crazy.
My cousins and I have already been thinking about that.
It was very difficult to accept this idea.
It was in the mind of many of us.
We want to live, and the only way
was to eat the bodies of our friends.
You know, one of the things that was used to persuade some
of those reluctant to eat the flesh of dead bodies
was the comparison with the Eucharist, the Catholic
Eucharist whereby, you know, Christ's body turn into bread
and you eat the bread.
And it was a sort of analogy that
helped some of the doubters, if you like, to eat human flesh.
RICARDO PEÑA: The survivors had only a screwdriver and an axe
that was on the plane.
So they had to make more tools.
And some of the tools that they made
were knives made out of plastic, of the windows.
And in February 2005, we had the luck to find one of these.
It's one of the knives that they made.
Well, the reason why they need a knife was to cut the meat.
So obviously, this was used for that.
It was sharpened or cut with the axe.
ROBERTO CANESSA: It's terrible to invade someone else
and to take advantage of someone that is dead.
And the only reason I did it is because I thought that if I had
died, I would be very proud to be part of a project of life.
FERNANDO PARRADO : It's hard to put yourself in that situation
but being there, you would have been one of us.
There's only one option, the decision comes quite easy.
ERIC JOHNSON: Think about it.
Every individual in that group had
to look down, see little pieces of protein,
a little pieces of fat.
And when they bring it up to their mouth, what's their mind
telling them?
For some, it's going to be, oh my god, this is my friend.
This was someone in seat 3-B. And then
others when they consumed it and all of a sudden
the body responded in a favorable way
where they felt some strength, maybe some flow of energy
back in the body, this was a glimmer of hope where they
can survive and be rescued.
[music playing]
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
From a religious point of view, for me, it wasn't a sin.
I understood that a body that was there, before the worms ate
it, could be utilized by us.
For me, that didn't affect me then
and it doesn't affect me now.
ROBERTO CANESSA: From the medical point
of view, it's proteins, it's fat, it's lipids, it's
carbohydrates, and a source of energy,
there's no doubt about it.
RICARDO PEÑA: For them, trying at different parts of the body,
eating organs that are more rich in vitamins,
was essential for the nutrition.
There was something that their bodies were craving.
When they would try something different,
it would taste good because the body's telling them, yes, you
need more vitamins, you need this.
Any different flavor was something
that was highly welcome.
So that's how they ended up eating everything,
you know, almost every part of the body.
ERIC JOHNSON: People use the term cannibalism for their food
source.
I actually consider it more of survival food.
They did what they had to do.
I've read and I have seen our story described as cannibalism,
which I think is wrong.
Cannibalism is when you kill to eat.
I mean, ancient warriors kill the enemy tribes
and then they eat the dead, and it
had a lot of tribal and spiritual meanings also,
you know.
In our case, I think the terminology that we should use
is anthropophagy, you know, and it's just terminology.
We made a pact and we did what people do now.
People give blood to friends, to family members.
They make organ transplants, you know, and we made a pact.
We said, OK, hand in hand, if I die, please use my body,
so at least one of us can get out of here.
As a human being, you will see and do things so horrible you
cannot even start to imagine.
But things get worse.
RICARDO PEÑA: What the survivors didn't realize was that this
place was a time bomb.
[ominous music]
Where the fuselage was, was a place that gets regularly hit
by avalanches.
It was just a matter of time before an avalanche would come
down.
Nobody in the plane had any experience with glaciers,
with avalanches, with snow that's
one of the tragedies of the situation.
[music playing]
SCOTT TOEPFER: Avalanches have been
known to move reinforced concrete buildings
off their foundations.
They've taken trains off the train tracks.
They have taken steel bridges and blown them apart.
So there is an enormous amount of impact pressure
behind avalanches.
FERNANDO PARRADO : You're at the worst thing that can happen
in your life.
I mean, we were stranded in the Andes,
surviving in the worst way a human being can survive.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
For three consecutive days, it snowed, and snowed, and snowed.
We were totally enclosed in the plane surrounded by snow.
FERNANDO PARRADO : Surviving in that way,
two and a half weeks after the plane crashed at night,
in complete darkness, we heard the distant sound.
SCOTT TOEPFER: I've heard some people describe an avalanche
when it started as a large boom, like a sonic boom
from an airplane as the avalanche failed
on its weak layer.
Sometimes they make hissing noises
and sometimes they're absolutely quiet,
you don't even know that they are coming down the mountain
until they actually strike you.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER: Very quickly,
we felt something like the sound of a pack of horses charging
at us, coming from above.
FERNANDO PARRADO : It was something so lightningly fast.
I heard the sound and I looked to my right.
And at that moment, the avalanche hit the airplane.
The avalanche came down off the mountain.
It went right in the open end of the fuselage,
blowing out the wall that they had built to help protect them
and buried all the people that were inside.
FERNANDO PARRADO : Two seconds later,
I was completely buried by the avalanche.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
Quickly, tons of snow got inside the fuselage
and buried us completely.
I was trapped completely by this snow and the avalanche
and it's the most deadly silence you may imagine.
I couldn't moved.
SCOTT TOEPFER: You are stuck in this contorted position.
You could be bent backwards with your heels against your head.
You could be in a position where the pain is just unendurable
and yet you can't breathe anymore either.
It can be a horrible, horrible way to die.
I felt I was dying, and then a smile came to my face
because I realized that everything was over.
You can only survive, you know,
three minutes without oxygen. So if you don't have adequate
oxygen to breathe, you will die in that three or four-minute
time frame.
SCOTT TOEPFER: Probably somewhere around 75%
of people that are buried in avalanches
die from asphyxiation.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
Roy Harley managed to get out, and then I got out.
The first thing that we wanted to do was dig our friends out.
Diego Storm, Nicolich.
But when I got to them, they were both dead.
SCOTT TOEPFER: It was it must have been an incredible panic
situation.
Now, what do I do?
What do I do?
They're all in this confined space.
But as soon as you move snow, you're
piling it on top of other people because everybody's
packed in so tight.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
We continued looking for people, uncovering what we could.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
I opened up my eyes and I realized that I was alive.
And they dug me out.
Roy Harley took all the snow from my face.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
And I remember looking for the only woman who
was alive at the time, which was Lilianna Methol.
Looking for her, I found the head of Nando Parrado,
and he managed to survive.
This avalanche killed eight of us, you know.
Eight of our guys were killed by the avalanche.
[music playing]
It's just another brutal blow.
As if things couldn't get any worse, it seems,
you know, avalanche comes, kills eight of them at that point.
And it's hard to imagine, I think.
You're trapped in this little space.
Now, it just completely covered the plane.
There's no light, and now they have a little space
and a little bit of oxygen to survive on.
And they're on top of their dead friends, the ones that were
just alive instance before.
And they have to survive three days and something like that.
I think it's just one of the most horrible circumstances you
can even imagine.
Our first concern was to be buried like a submarine
without power in the bottom of the ocean.
You know, you have water on top, how would you get out of there?
And also, we had air.
So we said, OK, don't move too much.
Breathe, breathe slowly because we don't know if we have air.
A lot of the guys said, OK, what does it matter?
There's certainly no air.
We are buried.
We are dead.
If we get out of this burial, of this fuselage,
we will be on the same situation that we were before, stranded,
lost in the middle of the Andes.
Nobody's looking for us.
We don't have any food.
We don't have water.
We're cold.
We'll die anyway.
So we are already buried, let's stay here.
RICARDO PEÑA: Now, they have to eat from their very own friends
that were right there.
Even worse, you know, I mean, the story of survivors
is it had so many extreme moments.
FERNANDO PARRADO : I think that the human spirit is stronger
than reality sometimes.
And we asked ourselves, what are we doing, you know?
At least we are breathing.
And if we are breathing, we are alive.
Let's fight until we stop breathing.
I found one of the poles that you
tie straps to hold the luggage.
And there was one of these poles in the floor.
And I used it to make a hole in the top of the fuselage
so that air would come in.
I always think that if the avalanche hadn't happened,
we wouldn't have survived.
And people say, why?
And I look back and I say, well, first, the avalanche
covered the airplane, and all the blizzards
and all the storms went over.
So we were not hit directly by the storms.
And secondly, we could wait there one and a half more
months because we had eight more bodies.
And it's very hard to think about that, but it's a reality.
I was terrified.
I didn't know what to do.
I just followed my heart, my intuition.
I wanted to go back to my father and I didn't take into account
all the risks that those things involved.
Had we known what we were going to face,
we would never have started.
[music playing]
RICARDO PEÑA: As this snow melted around it,
it left the fuselage in a bit sort of a pedestal.
So it was very unstable, and in fact, they were afraid
that it was going to roll off into a crevasse.
ERIC JOHNSON: Over the weeks, you know, they
came into a routine of drying out the airplane,
and drying out their sleeping pads,
and gathering water, and gathering food.
And it comes down again to a routine of basics.
They were in a survival situation.
FERNANDO PARRADO : The most secure place on that remote
landscape was the fuselage.
I mean, it was like a hut, was like an igloo,
and comfort was inside that place.
You only got out of there because you
had to trek, you had to test things, you had to explore.
ED VIESTURS: You know, the Andes are an amazing mountain range.
They stretch the whole length of South America.
They're rugged, they're tall.
The air is thin in the Andes just
like in any other high mountains of the world.
So it is a very challenging and difficult range
of mountains to try to climb.
FERNANDO PARRADO : The first guys who left the airplane
for the first time, they just went away like 250 yards from
the fuselage, and they found it so difficult to walk on deep
snow, crevasses, that they had to return.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
It was very hard to go out from the plane.
It was very hard because the plane, in some sense,
would protect you.
I went out on three expeditions.
Went out and came back, always trying to look
for the tail of the plane.
And in the last expedition, I remember that I surrender.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
I return with my eyes mostly blinded, burned by the snow
because I didn't have any shades.
And it loosened up my teeth and my feet
were practically gangrened.
It was very tough because you felt like an insect
against the hugest forces of nature.
CARLITOS PAEZ THROUGH INTERPRETER:
It is the story of being easier to die than it is to live.
The most attractive option was to die.
We are creatures of learning, you know,
and we had to gain experience.
If we want to attempt further expeditions,
we will have to be more careful, we
will have to be better equipped.
ED VIESTURS: Any survival story that you read about,
whether it's on a desert island or in the middle of the ocean
or in the mountains, people simply out of desperation
improvise and they build and make the things
that they need to survive.
[music playing]
FERNANDO PARRADO : Once that we had created a couple of snow
shoes, I was selected as the expedition leader
because probably of my will to get out of there and look
for my father and go back to him.
And then I said, OK, we have to test the equipment.
We have to go further down the valley
to see how we react ourselves as a team.
PIERS PAUL READ: Nando became a kind of, you know,
what in a boarding school called the head boy.
I mean, he was sort of--
the younger boys looked up to him.
[music playing]
FERNANDO PARRADO : Roberto, Antonio, myself,
we left one morning to try to get away as far as we could
from the airplane and come back in the day.
It was a test.
It was a research and development, you could call it.
And we started to walk down the valley, down the valley,
down the valley.
And suddenly, as soon as we went over a small hill,
we saw the tail.
The tail had flown, had been torn from the fuselage
and it had cartwheeled down the mountain.
And it was in the valley.
There were a few suitcases there.
And instantly, we searched for food.
We only found a small box of chocolates, and the camera.
We also found something that was quite interesting,
which were the batteries.
24 volt batteries that were installed there at the tail.
And we said, OK, we have batteries,
we have radios in the cockpit.
Maybe we can make these radios work.
So we decided to spend the night there,
and the next day, we went all the way up to the fuselage
again.
And we said, OK, we have to take the radios from the cockpit.
Roy helped us.
As he has assembled a stereo unit in his home,
we declared him the radio expert.
But you know, that connecting radio equipment to batteries
is not easy.
We didn't have any knowledge.
And from the back part of those radios, bundles of cables
came out that we had to cut.
How do we connect those cables to the batteries?
Impossible, you know.
They never worked.
And another piece of hope was completely destroyed
and we were very depressed because we had put a lot
of hope on the radio to work.
When we found the camera on the tail,
I remember saying, OK, it has a roll.
Let's take pictures because maybe this camera
will be found.
Maybe 50, 60, 100 years from now and they will reveal the roll
and they will see that people lived here.
Because on our minds, we were going to die.
So we took photographs.
[music playing]
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER:
One night, Arturo threw something at me,
and he said he was in a lot of pain.
So I lowered him and he told me that he was dying.
So for about an hour, I started doing CPR.
When I stopped, he was acting as if he was going to die.
And so I continued until finally, I told him
I couldn't do it anymore.
And he got really calm and he let go of my hands like this
and he died with the look of happiness on his face.
[music playing]
FERNANDO PARRADO : In the case of Numa Turcatti,
his physical condition told him that he was going to die,
that there was no way out.
And he did not survive.
GUSTAVO ZERBINO THROUGH INTERPRETER: We left him a lot
and he never complained.
He died weighing 55 pounds.
Waiting in his horrible at that
point when you're condemned to die.
[music playing]
I kept speaking with Roberto.
Roberto, we have to get out of here as soon as we can.
We couldn't try to escape to the south
because we didn't know where we were going.
To the north, the northern part of South America.
For us to the east, laid the whole Andes.
But to the west was Chile, and we had to aim to that country.
The pilot, before he died, had said we've crossed the Andes
and Chile is to the West.
And this, to the West is Chile, became a kind
of slogan, that kind of dogma that none of them could doubt.
FERNANDO PARRADO : We didn't know if we were in Argentina.
And Chile, we only knew that to the west
was Chile because of the sun.
We would climb one mountain, and from the top,
we would see green valleys lights of our city
in the horizon.
To the west, we would be saved.
Their information indicated that the wise decision
was west.
They thought over that ridge is going to be the green valleys
of Chile.
To the east, not only do they think that the whole Andes was
there, but there's nothing really encouraging for them
other than the fact that it's downhill.
The survivors didn't realize if they would have gone east
into that valley, there's a hotel 18 miles away from them.
[music playing]
The hotel is 18 miles away.
It is a hell of a hike out to get to that point.
RICARDO PENA: And it's on the other side of the Hotel river.
It is quite a big river too.
You can really cross it.
So most likely it wouldn't have been
able to get to the other side, where the hotel was.
So it's-- it's easy to second guess once you know everything
else.
But they did.
And Nando was very desperate to--
to get out of there because he-- he
wanted to go back to his father and tell him
that not everything was lost.
Nando was-- was raring to go.
PIERS RAUL READ: He had this extraordinary determination
to leave and get back to his father.
I think he realized that either he got himself out
of there or most likely they were all going to die.
PIERS RAUL READ: I think the others procrastinated,
they hesitated, they held him back,
they thought it wasn't right, they kept putting it off.
It's difficult to know why.
I think partly because-- because they were frightened
he might fail.
He had the same time understood
that he needed support.
ROBERTO CANESSA: So he asked me to--
to go with him.
And I saw that in the plane, there
were lots of people pushing Nando and grabbing Nando
thought of getting out of there.
But they wouldn't go with him.
So I thought that this was a very coward attitude
of supporting someone, but not completely.
ROBERTO CANESSA: At that moment, I
realized that I was the guy that-- that could have Nando.
Nando said because you see very well.
You can handle the maps.
And you're a handy man.
And-- and I want you to go.
ROBERTO CANESSA: And Tintin was fit, and Nando was fit,
I was fit.
The last expedition was made up of Parrado, Canessa,
and [inaudible].
And they had the sleeping bag.
I had the idea that with the insulation
you can make a sleeping bag.
CARLITOS PAEZ: But I not only had the idea, I made it myself.
And it was without a doubt the proudest moment of my life.
The contribution that I made for that final expedition,
that sleeping bag that I made.
Carlitos with a needle and copper wire.
Sew those pieces together.
NANDO PARRADO: And we made like-- like a sleeping bag that
was fundamental to cope with the cold in-- in the scape.
When I go on a climb, you know,
I have a checklist of equipment.
Cold weather gear, solid heavy boots,
crampons which attach to the boots which give me traction
in the snow.
Ice axes gloves, hats, insulated clothing, tents, sleeping bags,
ropes, anchors.
ED VIESTURS: I mean, there's-- there's a-- a pile of equipment
that we really don't ever leave home without when we go
into the mountains.
And when these guys crashed, you know,
they were rugby players, they were dressed for summer.
ED VIESTURS: And to land in the middle of this Arctic
wilderness, you might say with literally nothing,
it was pretty amazing feat.
We've got to improvise.
We've got to build and create our own equipment just so
that we can get out of here.
We had already decided that the three of us
were going to leave the airplane as soon as we
had a window in the weather.
NANDO PARRADO: Finally, we left on December 12.
The three of us.
We left to walk off.
And Nando returns, and he tells me.
Carlitos, before leaving, I want to give a kiss to your rosary.
CARLITOS PAEZ: In exchange for that, he gives me a little shoe
and he tells me.
Carlitos, I promise you that I'm going to come back
for this other shoe.
That he was going to come back to reunite the pair.
But then he adds, and this is the most important.
But if this doesn't happen, and you guys
need to use my mother and my sister, and do it.
And that was such a great act because he
didn't have to give us that authorization, but he did.
To the West is Chile, and this was the idea
which we left in the fuselage.
The only certain thing was the West was Chile.
ROBERTO CANESSA: On the first day,
we were very optimistic and full of energy.
And at the beginning of the day,
everything is very easy because it's always very hard.
ROBERTO CANESSA: But as the day passes by,
the snow begins to melt.
NANDO PARRADO: I had never claimed any mountains before.
So I didn't know what I was doing.
But it was so strenuous.
You know, at that altitude, you breathe
and you get less oxygen.
NANDO PARRADO: And I remember seeing those films
with climbers, walking very slowly towards the summit
of the mountain.
And I said, why don't they walk faster?
You know, and then I was in the situation,
and I just couldn't move fast, you know.
You just take five breaths and move one leg.
And then the other leg and you climb and climb.
ED VIESTURS: When they were confronted with this headwall,
they had 2000 feet of climbing to do at a 45 degree
angle, which is quite steep.
And the snow was an impediment to their climbing higher.
And you can imagine without any skill,
without any training, you're like a child when you are
confronted with a snow slope.
You try to go straight up.
You might be using your hands and your feet.
You're slipping or sliding.
And for every step that you go up,
you slide back a half a step.
RICARDO PENA: It's hard to explain the fear of the unknown
that having no clue what you're getting yourself into.
It could be terrifying.
You know even in mountaineering when we do know
what we're up against, what the route is, what the summit is,
what it's been documented and everything.
It's still intimidating.
NANDO PARRADO: Looks like courage.
It looks--
And I can tell you it was not courage.
It was fear.
And which I then took to climb through--
through the rocky parts instead of the snow leaving the snow.
And this came on loose.
And there were huge rocks coming down.
Something you know, we are going to close up.
Nando, come down.
This is not the way.
NANDO PARRADO: I was so--
so wasted, you know.
When we reached one of the false summits.
I said I--
there's no strength in me.
You know, I don't I said come on.
Are you breathing?
You know, you're still breathing.
Come on. You can do it.
OK.
I said I'll keep on going until I stop breathing.
NANDO PARRADO: You know that was my-- my thought.
Nothing more profound.
Nothing more critical.
I'm alive.
I'm breathing.
I'll keep on going.
And we put the sleeping bag.
And-- and the wind come down.
And the rally was incredible.
It was just gorgeous.
ROBERTO CANESSA: The moon came down.
And we had some rain.
And we had fine on the tail of the plane.
And taking this rain and I couldn't believe
that I was enjoying the scenery after struggling and crying
and weeping.
What we were facing after the first day
climbing that first mountain was not what I expected to find.
NANDO PARRADO: The first day I thought
I was going to be in the summit and looking
at the green valleys of Chile.
But we were halfway climbing the mountain.
CARLITOS PAEZ: What is it--
it was very disheartening for the first three days
because it took them three days to climb up.
What they thought would only take one day, took three.
CARLITOS PAEZ: And for three days,
we saw them as little points up there on the mountain.
RICARDO PENA: Alberto was looking at a distance
and seeing a line thinking that could be a road.
And it was impossible for them to tell if it was or not.
The road is very interesting because Nando says
that the road doesn't exist.
ROBERTO CANESSA: But the road is there.
And I bet everything that I saw that road.
We actually know now that what he was looking at was the road.
Once I was there, I took a photograph.
RICARDO PENA: And I realized that we could actually
see the road that we use now from the East
to access this Valley.
But this is a very interesting because Although this was
the right answer at that moment was so much in a chance
in 1,000 that there was a road.
They were in a very tough situation.
They had already made a huge effort
to get that high on the mountain.
And Nando's still had the hope that looking over
the top of the mountain, he was going to see green valleys
and everything.
When I was drawn down, Nando would say let's keep going.
NANDO PARRADO: I would climb the mountain.
And I would see salvacion on the other side.
And when we climbed that first mountain, what
we saw to the other side really froze me.
I couldn't breathe.
I couldn't speak.
I couldn't even think because what we saw was horrible.
And still green valleys, we saw mountains and snow covered
peaks 360 degrees around us to the horizon all around us.
NANDO PARRADO: And I knew there that I was really dead.
I decided the way I was going to die.
There was absolutely no way we could survive
what we were looking at.
And I told Robert, look, there's no way we can go back.
The only ways forward will die.
But we'll die trying.
NANDO PARRADO: And you know, he looked at me and said, OK.
We have done so many things together.
Let's do one more.
Let's die together.
When the three of them Tintin and Nando and Roberto got
to the top of the mountain.
And so there weren't the green valleys of Chile
that had always supposed to be on the side of the mountain.
They were--
PIERS RAUL READ: It was-- it was a terrible moment
and psychologically.
It was a terrible blow.
And again, it shows Nando's extraordinary sort
of psychological resilience.
That instead of being daunted, and depressed,
and giving up in despair, he just said right.
We're going to go on.
We're going to keep going West.
As it's been said that hard and tough and challenging
situations create character.
ED VIESTURS: I think they actually reveal character.
When you're put into a situation,
a desperate situation, all the things that you are and learned
come out.
Roberto and myself we got along very--
very well together.
NANDO PARRADO: We were a fantastic team.
And I told her to look.
The three of us move very slowly.
And we said Antonio, please go back give us
whatever you have a food.
The two of us would go forward.
And tell the guys that will climb and trek to the West.
Tintin he was delighted he beetle back down the mountain
as quickly as he possibly could.
Because, at least, they felt safe in that plane.
I mean, you know they had survived and would
go on surviving.
CARLITOS PAEZ: After three days, we saw that one of them
came down.
And we went to meet him.
And it was Tintin.
When we got there, he told us instead of finding
the green valleys of Chile, they saw pathetic and disheartening
panorama.
But Nando and Roberto made the decision
to take teams food and his extra clothes.
And they sent him to the fuselage with a message
that the two of them would forge ahead.
And they wouldn't stop until they were dead.
RICARDO PENA: He saw two peaks that had no snow in them.
And behind those peaks, you can see no more peaks.
And you see the moisture of the Pacific Ocean.
When you stand there, and you look
at how far those peaks are, it's really brings it home.
What a desperate situation they were in.
My need to get out was completely unique to me
because there would be a time when we didn't have more
bodies, except the bodies of my mother and my sister.
NANDO PARRADO: And I wouldn't even
like to think to get to that moment
when we would have to use their corpses to survive.
I had to get out of there.
And we started down the mountains.
And that it.
It was two guys deciding to go forward.
ROBERTO CANESSA: And I said let's go for it.
Let's forget about it.
And-- and I knew it was-- this was a no return way.
But every step is a step.
And if we had gone back to-- to the plane,
there were no chances.
RICARDO PENA: I wanted to see what they were up against,
what they had gone through.
Just how challenging was.
Especially for a mountaineer, it would
be I was fascinated by it.
RICARDO PENA: So in December 2005, we retrace escape route.
We chose the same days that the survivors had gone.
We wanted to experience the same snow conditions, recreate
as much as possible the challenge
that they had without, of course, killing ourselves.
So we brought equipment.
We came prepared.
RICARDO PENA: Our plan was to try to set up similar camps
to what they had done as closely as possible.
But once we were on the slope, the slope
was so avalanche prone that whole slope could go.
You could fall to your death.
And so we-- I didn't like it.
And I thought the only thing to do here
is just push and go all the way to the top in one day.
And once you hit the ridge, you're safe around altitude.
You're safe.
Nothing is going to fall on you.
And so it was a brutal day.
It was a really hard day.
We-- we pushed really hard and we went all the way up
basically covering the distance that Robert took cover in three
days.
RICARDO PENA: It was exhausting.
When you're in the mountains, it's
much harder to judge distances, and sizes.
And the valleys they climb down on are just immense.
They really-- there's a picture that we took with where you see
those little dots.
And just a black little speck there.
And it's actually Mario one of our expedition members.
And once you see the little dug,
you realize the size of the valley you're looking at.
It's very, very huge mountains all around you.
It's really a very humbling experience.
What I remember of the 10 days with Roberto it's--
it's like blurred the images of continuous and strenuous
effort.
NANDO PARRADO: It was so huge.
You know, the mountains are so huge.
That it looks like you don't make any progress.
You know, and you think OK I'll get there.
I'll get there in two or three hours or five hours.
But so huge that you never get there.
You know.
The only way you go forward is because you can't go back.
ED VIESTURS: Nando and Roberto as they journeyed out
for those 10 long arduous days, that was an amazing feat.
And you truly have to think about what they suffered
through.
They can't explain that.
ED VIESTURS: I think I have an idea of what they went through.
But it's still quite an amazing feat.
RICARDO PENA: I think it was Roberto
that set one foot on the ground, and another foot on snow.
This is the line between life and death.
I'm going to make it.
I'm not going to die there like everybody else.
I'm going to live.
That line, where the ice finished
for me was the line between life and death for myself.
Yeah.
It was like crossing a very thin line jumping from one side
to another one.
We were very happy.
Now, that the temperatures are warmer, now that they're not
in such a danger to freezing, now,
they don't have refrigeration for their food.
And so the food starts going right.
And that's a new problem.
ROBERTO CANESSA: The next day, we were very--
very happy to see things changing
from the normal atmosphere of snow white rock and--
and then we would begin hearing water that was
pouring out and hearing was--
was going back to normal life.
And then we saw this river was growing out of the ice.
And I see--
I saw a green spot there.
NANDO PARRADO: I had a grasp of life.
First, when we saw that there was some civilization here,
you know, we saw a cow.
So that it must be a human being nearby.
RICARDO PENA: I could see how significant that was for them.
We start seeing plants, we start seeing a little bit of flowers.
I mean, living things.
And you smell these flowers.
You haven't smelled anything like that in so many days.
RICARDO PENA: And little grass.
You can smell it, and it's like wow.
It's just.
And they talk about starting to find their first signs
of civilization.
And they had a big debate about the weather.
If somebody threw it from a plane or something,
and to at them.
You can't open a window in a plane.
Obviously, didn't come from a plane.
Like this it's a sign of human--
humans being here.
I was in a five star hotel.
I had water.
I had grass to eat.
ROBERTO CANESSA: And I realized with what simple things
we need to be happy and how we demand lots more than what we
need in life.
The precise moment, I really knew
that I was going to survive.
I was looking towards the West and the West
looking towards the North and--
NANDO PARRADO: Look, Nando, a man on a horse.
And I looked and instantly I saw him.
We started to shout.
Both of us
NANDO PARRADO: Somebody is looking at us.
It's a human being.
We couldn't communicate.
But he looked at us because obviously he couldn't believe
that there were two guys so high up in the mountains.
RICARDO PENA: It was very difficult to communicate
across this river because of the noise of this raging river.
You can't cross it.
There's just no way and no question.
If you get down, it'll take you.
It'll take you down.
You'll drown.
NANDO PARRADO: The night came and we lost sight of him.
And we spent all that night with Roberto.
I remember talking to say, OK, look, we are near civilization.
So maybe tomorrow we'll get help, you know.
I feel so happy now.
How do you feel?
You know, all those things.
And we have to get help from the other guys.
NANDO PARRADO: And the next morning at around 5:36, we
saw small fire on the shore at the edge of the river
on the other side of the river.
I was stronger than water.
So I went down.
The sound of the water was so high
that we couldn't understand each other.
And this guy with great intelligence and common sense,
he got a small stone, put that piece of paper around it,
tied it with a string, pencil, and threw it across the river.
And that's when I wrote that message, you know.
NANDO PARRADO: I come from a plane that
fell into the mountains.
I'm Uruguayan.
We have been walking for 10 days.
I have a friend up there who is injured.
In the plane, there are still 14 injured people.
We have to get out of here quickly,
and we do not know how.
NANDO PARRADO: We don't have any food.
We are weak.
When are you going to come and fetch us?
Please.
We can't even walk.
Where are we?
For me, the most important part is the last sentence,
where are we?
We didn't have a clue where we were.
We knew we were in the Andes in South America.
But that was our reference point.
Where are we?
NANDO PARRADO: I throw it back to him.
He reads it.
He looks at me.
Reads it again.
He say OK.
Wait.
And he got on his horse.
But before he threw me a little piece of bread and cheese
with I brought Roberto.
NANDO PARRADO: It took him 10 hours
to go by horseback to the nearest civilization.
When he got there, he got five or six military men
on horseback from a military post and he climbed back.
NANDO PARRADO: And when they come back, we were so happy,
you know.
You are leaving behind horror.
You are leaving behind death.
And you embrace life again.
NANDO PARRADO: And suddenly, reality started to hit on us,
you know.
When we saw that journalist and news man from--
from nowhere started to appear in the middle of the mountains.
Nando lost his family.
ROBERTO CANESSA: And I think this was very devastating
for him.
They gave us some food.
They gave us warm soup.
I remember things like that.
And then they display them up and say,
where are the other guys?
NANDO PARRADO: And I draw on the map.
And they said that's Argentina.
That's it.
You couldn't have crossed the Andes on foot.
And I said, look, I don't know if that's Argentina.
But I know that they are there.
The distance they covered from where the fuselage was to lose
my tennis was about 37 miles.
RICARDO PENA: We measured it with GPS.
The problem with that number is that these are really
long miles.
What Nando and Roberto did still kind of blows me away
with literally no training, no skills,
no knowledge of what they were doing, and no equipment
somehow they survived.
I have to retest to the expedition.
I think is just a really inspiring example
of the human spirit of what humans
can do in extreme conditions when there's
that strong willed.
We heard the Uruguayan Ambassador on the radio
that it was official that Canessa and Parado had
appeared.
Imagine that moment.
What it was like to hear the names Parrado and Canessa?
CARLITOS PAEZ: Because to hear these names
was the end of our story, the end of our pain,
the end of our fight.
It was the beginning of our freedom.
That was what we had fought for.
Imagine what that was like.
We were like crazy men around the radio.
It still gives me goose bumps just thinking about it today.
Hundreds of times and 37 years after it
happened still it makes me emotional.
NANDO PARRADO: And that's when they call for helicopters.
And when the helicopters arrive, the same happened.
What are the guys?
And I draw the semicircle.
And the pilot look at me and say, look, I will never
find them.
You have to come with us.
So it took me, put me on the helicopter,
strapped me with seat belts, headphones, and microphone.
And we took off.
NANDO PARRADO: The pilot kept telling to me
I don't have enough power.
I'm too high for this type of helicopter.
Are you sure?
Are you sure you're not lost?
No, I'm not lost.
I know where I am.
I remember the helicopter shaking and the plexiglass
from the front vibrating.
Looked like it was coming off the rear.
NANDO PARRADO: It's the engine of the helicopter
was at full power.
And finally, we crossed over to the mountains.
And then the pilot threw the helicopter down and said, look,
it's there.
It's there.
And the fuselage was white and white.
So until we were about 300 yards away.
He couldn't see.
I see.
NANDO PARRADO: Two of my friends jumped into a helicopter.
And I grabbed Daniel the third one with my hands.
And the pilot took off.
How many do we have?
And I said three, three.
I said close the doors.
Close the door.
So I went there I closed the door.
Closed the other door.
I said give me a break, please.
NANDO PARRADO: And this friends of mine embraced me.
And they were crying and shouting so happy.
You know, I remember those smiles.
So big.
And there was a wonderful moment, you know.
My father called me and he was crying.
And he said Nando is alive, Nando is alive.
He was sitting in my bed and hugging me.
There was my father crying.
And he was saying you were right.
He's alive.
So that-- that was the way I knew that Roberto and Nando
had appeared.
They were asking in Uruguay to give forth
a list of the survivors.
CARLOS PAEZ: If it's for Uruguay then I
can give it to the country.
And then I went about uncovering the names of the boys.
And I started Fernando Parrado, Antonio Vizentine.
Until I came to the name of my son.
And it's evident that I had to hold the phone down because
of all the force of that name and the surprise
in the marvelous feeling of knowing that my son was alive.
I go to the door of this old hospital.
And I was shouting that I wanted to go in.
Nobody could stop me.
And he was very skinny, but so beautiful.
And he held my father, and his arms,
and he pulled him out of the floor.
He was strong.
NANDO PARRADO: People ask me at that moment.
Did you felt guilt because you were alive?
I always said we celebrated life.
You know, we didn't have any guilt.
What?
What kind of guilt?
10 weeks ago, an airplane with 45 people aboard.
Most of the members of a rugby team from Uruguay
crashed on a flight from Montevideo Uruguay
to Santiago, Chile.
REPORTER: There was a search.
But it was abandoned several weeks ago.
Those mountains are a graveyard for airplanes.
There 18,000 feet high.
Their icy cold and continuing snow makes visibility
there just about zero.
And all those aboard were given up for dead.
And then today, the incredible happened.
Two starving, exhausted survivors
would hike for 10 days on their way to civilization.
I think that the biggest psychiatrist in the world
would never find an answer to the human behavior over there.
Would I have done the same thing?
I think I mean, when it came out in America,
everyone in New York was saying how could I have behaved if I'd
been in that situation?
In Spain, for instance, the first press releases
had titles such as the cannibals have returned.
NANDO PARRADO: We had survive on the flesh of our friends.
And we didn't want to hurt any feelings from the families,
which were our families.
PIERS RAUL READ: These survivors in the most appalling
conditions didn't turn into savages.
They sustained one another.
They kept their faith in God.
And that God would-- would bring some of them out of it.
I think it helped them enormously.
That when they were in Chile still in Chile, and in hospital
were being cared for, a priest came by and said
you did the right thing.
And that the Catholic Church immediately
said they did the right thing.
The survivors had decided at this point
that they wanted a book to be written.
And they formed a committee to choose
the publisher and the author.
They were very afraid of what kind of book would be written.
PIERS RAUL READ: Inevitably the truth
showed that some of the survivors
had performed in a heroic manner.
And others in a less heroic manner.
PIERS RAUL READ: But I felt that there was no point in writing
a book unless you were going to tell the truth.
The picture of none of it builds up
in the book as some unexceptional
and in the end the person who saved them all comes
from the other characters.
It doesn't come from Nando himself.
ROBERTO CANESSA: It's very strange
because we came out of the mountain with the same dreams.
I had my house, my family, everything.
And where he went to his house,
his pictures were at the fireplace with that members
of his family.
NANDO PARRADO: My father being very pragmatic
said he's not coming back.
So he gave away my clothes to people
and he sold my motorcycle.
And he went into a very difficult mental state.
He loved my mother and my sister very--
very much.
He cried for them to the end of his life.
ROBERTO CANESSA: Nando tried to follow the normal dreams
of a young guy.
And here he was completely lost.
He-- he didn't know what to do, where to go.
And so I don't know if he was tougher when he was out
of the mountain or when he was up there in the mountains.
The Andes made him stronger because he
lost his mother and his sister.
And later, afterwards, he continued
with such an amazing force of will
that really isn't able to be expressed or understood.
NANDO PARRADO: When I came back from the Andes, I said look.
What was the most important thing in your life before that?
Before the plane crash, my father
was the President of the Uruguay racing drivers association.
So he took me to the races since I was very young.
NANDO PARRADO: So I love the sound the cars, the racing.
And I wanted to race.
So I started racing because I thought
it was important for me.
It has nothing to do with the danger with fear.
No.
It has to do with what I felt I should do in life.
I know I'm going to face maybe some dangers today.
But I don't look back and say, well, I had so much fear.
I want to have fear anymore.
The main reason in my will of going out of there
was to see my family and my father again.
I thought that naming the highest mountain we climbed
after his name I was kind of a gift to him.
Even though he's gone through this tragic event,
and lost his mother, and his sister,
you know, he decided that rather than grieve
and completely shut down, why not revel in life?
Why not revel in the fact that I survived this?
ED VIESTURS: And if anything I think he kicked it up a notch
and said, I'm going to take advantage of this life I have
and do the things I love rather than not do anything at all.
And through cars, I found a beautiful girl.
NANDO PARRADO: I married her.
We have been married for more than 30 years.
So I blessed the moment I decided I had to race cars.
Two years ago, we all went to the crash site together.
VERONIQUE PARRADO: It was an incredible experience.
And I think that in some sense, it
was a way for him to show his daughters where they were born.
Because had Nando not walked out, not done what he did,
they never would have been born.
So it was a way of showing them
the beginning of their lives.
NANDO PARRADO: If I balance, I have had a fantastic life.
I had a fantastic family.
And I'm doing what I love, which is appreciating
the astonishing fact of being alive every day,
every single breath.
NANDO PARRADO: We went back to Chile with Roberto and Gustavo
and our families
And we were driving through these dirt roads
climbing the mountains.
And suddenly, we-- we see a man on a horse coming down
the mountain.
No one on the side of this small road.
And we drive past him.
And it was Sergio.
NANDO PARRADO: We recognized him.
So we stopped the car.
And drove tonight, we ran towards him.
I say sir please, stop, stop.
And we said we are lost can you help us.
Can you tell us where we should go to?
NANDO PARRADO: And he looked at us and he started crying.
I have that photograph of Sergio and the two
of us 35 years later.
We remember him and whenever we go and visit him.
Yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Nando Parrado.
NANDO PARRADO: Sometimes it's very difficult
to speak about oneself, you know.
But it's nice to feel that sometimes you
can give something back.
I don't know if I have a message I can share what I feel,
and what I learned, and what my life has brought me to.
It's hard sometimes, you know.
Life is simpler than it looks.
For me, love is the most important thing in the world.
The love for our families kept us alive.
NANDO PARRADO: You know, I would also
like to honor all of the people that were in that plane.
Because instead still Nando here,
Marcelo would be here Guido.
You know, Arturo, Alexis, Gaston.
Why am I here and not them?
That's one of the questions that we'll never have an answer.
I sincerely I wish that you were here, that we would have never
boarded that airplane.
You know, I send you the biggest and warmest
embrace I could keep whatever you are
and you're always in my heart.