Читать книгу Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories - Collins Maps - Страница 22

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was a chartered plane carrying five crew and forty passengers, including a rugby team and their friends and family.

The flight took off on 12 October 1972 and should have been a fairly standard hop over the Andes from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, where the rugby team was due to play a match. But a storm in the mountains forced the plane to stop overnight at Mendoza. When they took off again the next afternoon, the bad weather still hadn’t cleared, but the experienced military crew were confident they could navigate through the serrated Andean peaks.

As they climbed through the pass, the mountains on either side were lost in the clouds, so the pilots had to estimate their position based on their speed and route. But they made a crucial error, failing to fully allow for the very strong headwinds. These retarded the plane’s progress severely, so that when they radioed air controllers in Santiago that they were over Curicó, Chile, and asked for permission to descend, they were in fact still deep in the jagged jaws of the mountains.

The plane hit an unnamed peak between Cerro Sosneado and Volcán Tinguiririca in the remote mountains that form the border between Chile and Argentina. With both wings torn off and the fuselage ripped open, the plane came to rest in the snow at around 3,600 m (11,800 ft) up the mountain.