Alive [antikvár]

Preface On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild F-227 of the Uruguayan Air Force, chartered by an amateur rugby team, set off from Montevideo in Uruguay for Santiago in Chile. Reports of bad weather in the Andes brought the plane down in Mendoza, a town on the Argentinian side of the range. The next day the weather had improved. The Fairchild set off again, flying south to the Planchón Pass. At 3.21 p.m. the pilot reported to Air Traffic Control in Santiago that he was over the Pass of Planchón, and at 3.24 that he was over the town of Curicó in Chile. He was authorized to turn north and begin his descent to the airport of Pudahuel. At 3.30 he reported his height as 15,000 feet, but when Santiago control tower spoke to the Fairchild a minute later there was no reply. For eight days the Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans searched for the plane. Among the passengers there had been not just the fifteen members of the rugby team but twenty-five of their friends and relations, all coming from prominent families in Uruguay. The search was fruitless. The pilot had evidently miscalculated his position and flown north towards Santiago when he was still in the middle of the mountains. It was early spring in the southern hemisphere, and the Andes had suffered exceptionally heavy falls of snow. The roof of the plane was white. There was little chance that it would ever be found, and less chance still that any of the forty-five passengers and crew could have survived the crash. Ten weeks later a Chilean peasant tending his cattle in a remote valley deep in the Andes saw, on the far side of a