Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, Part 1

The Reference Desk

On October 13, 1972, a chartered Fairchild F-227 carrying 45 people, most rugby players from Uruguay, crashed in the Andes mountains. Of the 45 people on board, 16 survived. The survivors were stranded in the mountains for 72 days, during which time they faced freezing temperatures, life-threatening injuries, an avalanche, and imminent starvation. To save their own lives, the survivors had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends?

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Join us again next week for part 2!

Sources:

• Miracle of the Andes: How Survivors of the Flight Disaster Struggled to Stay Alive
• After the Plane Crash—and the Cannibalism—a Life of Hope
• Story Of The 1972 Andes Plane Crash In 'Out Of The Silence'
• 70 Days Battling Starvation and Freezing in the Andes: A Chronicle of Man's Unwillingness to Die
• After the Andes
• Haunted by cannibalism: ‘I will never forget that first incision’
• The Long Way Home
• THE STORY OF THE ANDES SURVIVORS
• Survival: I Will Not Die on This Mountain
• Alive Again: New Findings in the 1972 Andes Plane Crash
• Society of the Snow
• Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado and Vince Rause
• I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash in the Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives by Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci
• Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century by Christine Quigley

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