Nando Parrado recalls surviving 1972 Andes plane wreck

Nando Parrado recalls surviving 1972 Andes plane wreck



Abandoned in the unforgiving, frozen wasteland of the Andes Mountains, 22-year-old Fernando Parrado was certain he was going to die.



Even now, 45 years after the plane crash disaster that killed 29 people and led him and the 15 other survivors to resort to eating the corpses of their dead friends in order to survive for 72 days in the Andes, Mr Parrado remembers the feeling of despair and his absolute certainty that he would not make it.



'There was no way out. No way,' Mr Parrado tells DailyMail.com. 'Until the last minute of the 72nd day, I thought I was going to die. When you are condemned to die for such a long time, fear does not go away… I was so afraid I wanted to vomit every day because I had a cramp in my stomach because I was dead. I was a walking dead man… Hope only prolonged the agony.'



Mr Parrado – who goes by Nando – and 44 others from Montevideo, Uruguay, were flying to Chile on Friday, October 13, 1972, when their plane crashed in the middle of the Andes Mountains, miles away from civilization. Most of the passengers were part of a rugby club team along with friends and family of the players, who had chartered the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, so they could play matches in Santiago.



By the end of their second day on the mountain, 17 people had died from their injuries, including Mr Parrado's mother, and his best friend. Eight days later his younger sister died in his arms. By the time they were rescued after Mr Parrado and another rugby player, Roberto Canessa, found help after 10 days of climbing out of the mountains there were only 16 survivors left.





With few warm clothes and no real equipment or food to speak of, the survivors had to use their ingenuity and the remnants of the wrecked plane, a Fairchild FH-227D, to stay alive. They tore off the covers from the plane seats to make blankets for warmth in the freezing temperatures and made contraptions from foil inside the seats to melt ice for drinking water.



Most necessary was their decision to eat the bodies of their friends who had died.



'Hunger is the most primitive fear of the human being,' Mr Parrado says. 'Not knowing when you are going to eat again is the most incredible fear a human being can have… And then when your body starts to feed upon itself, everything that you have inside is turned into energy and you feel it and that is killing you.



'And I said, "Man, I am dying. I am dying. I'll be dead in three, four, five, six, ten days. I'll be dead". But you're not dead. And you're a human being and you think and say, okay, what do I do now? And I said, "Okay, the only food that we have are the dead bodies of our friends and the crew. That's what we have". And that's – when you have one option, you take one option. If you have two options, you can analyze and decide. But if there's only one… It's not a mystery, it's not complicated. It's easier than you think because it's the only option.'



Mr Parrado, now 67, talks about the crash as a matter of fact, simply as one horrible event in the midst of an otherwise fulfilling life. If anything, he talks about the experience with some cynicism, but he isn't traumatized. As he speaks, his voice is calm and confident and he affirms 'there is nothing I cannot say' about the disaster of 45 years ago.



'It doesn't rule my day by any means – or my life by any means. I am very pragmatic,' he says. 'I was educated by my father who was the king of pragmatism. And as soon as I came out of that ordeal, the first day, my father told me: "Look Nando, there's no way you can change the past. This is not going to be the most important thing in your life. You have been born again. Don't destroy your second life. Have a life".



'And that's what I've been doing, having a life. So I don't dream, I don't have nightmares. Since the first night that I spent in the hospital [after being rescued] until last night, I never had one single second of an image of what happened to me while I sleep. Of course sometimes I think about it… but only usually if I face something that looks a little bit important or a little bit difficult, I say, Jesus man, this compared to that? Well this is a joke.'