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He continued: "And I said, 'Man, I am dying. "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." "Hunger is the most primitive fear of the human being," Parrado says. Most necessary was their decision to eat the bodies of their friends who had died. 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. 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. By the time they were rescued after Parrado and another rugby player, Roberto Canessa, found help after 10 days of climbing out of the mountains there were only 16 survivors left. Eight days later his younger sister died in his arms. 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.īy the end of their second day on the mountain, 17 people had died from their injuries, including Parrado's mother, and his best friend. 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. One of the survivors, Fernando Parrado, now 67, (pictured with his wife) was only 22 years old when the plane crashed. I was a walking dead man… Hope only prolonged the agony." 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. "Until the last minute of the 72nd day, I thought I was going to die. PHOTO COURTESY: MailOnlineĪbandoned in the unforgiving, frozen wasteland of the Andes Mountains, 22-year-old Fernando Parrado was certain he was going to die.Įven 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, Parrado remembers the feeling of despair and his absolute certainty that he would not make it, MailOnlinereported. Survivors Roy Harley (with his back to the camera), Roberto Canessa (left), Antonio Vizintin (center) and Parrado (who took the picture).