Flight 205 lifted off from Buenos Aires at 19:50, carrying five crew and forty-seven passengers across roughly 250 miles of darkened countryside. For most of the journey there was nothing remarkable about it. The Commando was a sturdy wartime workhorse, twin-engined and reliable, the kind of aircraft that had carried tens of thousands of people safely over these same Pampas. The route was familiar. The passengers were the ordinary traffic of an Argentine summer: vacationers, families, people heading to the coast for reasons that died with them and were never fully recorded. They had every reason to expect to land within the hour and step out into the warm sea air. As the aircraft neared Mar del Plata, controllers cleared it to land on runway 12. The night, though, was working against everyone aboard.

Two things compounded the danger. The airport's non-directional beacon, the radio aid that would have guided the crew down through cloud, was not functioning. And the visibility was poor, the runway lights smeared and indistinct in the murk. The captain, unfamiliar with the local airspace, misjudged his approach. The Commando came in too high, passing over the runway at about 85 meters, and overshot. He made the right call and committed to a go-around, pushing the engines to climb away and try again. But in the bad light and worse visibility, the heavy aircraft stalled. At 21:40 it struck the sea roughly 1.2 kilometers from the airport, the warm Atlantic swallowing it in the dark.

All five crew and forty-six of the forty-seven passengers were lost. That so many died makes the survival of the one almost unbearable to imagine. Roberto Servente, a businessman, came out of the wreckage into the open sea with multiple fractures and grave injuries, and somehow did not give up. For four hours he stayed alive in the water, and then he swam, broken, toward a shore he could barely see. He reached it. The story of that night could have ended in pure tragedy, and for fifty-one families it did. For Servente, it became the strange beginning of a long second life.

Servente did not let the crash define him by its grief alone. In the years that followed he went to work for the very airline whose plane had nearly killed him, and he rose to become a director of Austral. He carried the night of 16 January 1959 for the rest of his days and lived a remarkably long life, dying on 7 March 2014 at the age of ninety-three, fifty-five years after the water nearly took him. The official investigation laid most of the blame on the crew's handling of the failed approach, finding that the captain, unfamiliar with the airspace, had miscalculated the instrument approach, and that the strain of the moment contributed to the loss of control. But it noted, too, the dead beacon and the blinding weather. Mostly the report is a ledger of how small failures, stacked together on a dark night, cost fifty-one people everything. At the time it was the second-worst accident in Argentine aviation history, and it remains one of the deadliest ever involving the Curtiss C-46. In Mar del Plata, older residents long remembered it simply as the night the city did not sleep.