Qualla: LAN-Chile Flight 621

LAN-Chile Flight 621: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last message from the cockpit spoke of ice - ice forming on the wings, ice on the propellers, the small twin-engined plane laboring in the thin mountain air. Then nothing. On 3 April 1961, a Douglas DC-3 carrying the footballers of CD Green Cross home from a match disappeared over the Andes near Linares. Twenty-four people were aboard, and none survived. For more than half a century the mountains kept most of the wreck, and the men who died on Cerro Lástimas became a wound that Chilean football never quite forgot.

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LAN-Chile Flight 621: A Team Going Home

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Green Cross was a Santiago club with a loyal following, and the plane was bringing its players back from a match in southern Chile. The journey was a long island-hopping haul up the country: the flight had begun far south in Castro, on the island of Chiloe, with stops at Puerto M...

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LAN-Chile Flight 621: Lost on the Last Leg

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The plane had left Temuco late in the day for what should have been the routine final run to Santiago. Somewhere over the high cordillera near Linares, something went wrong - the crew's last transmission described ice building on the wings and propellers, the kind of load that ca...

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LAN-Chile Flight 621: The Captain Among Them

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One name on board carried weight far beyond Chile. Eliseo Mouriño, born in Argentina in June 1927, had been a star of Boca Juniors and a centre-back for the Argentina national team at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. By 1961 he was playing in Chile, and he died with his Green Cross ...

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LAN-Chile Flight 621: The Search and the Silence

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rescuers reached the high country a week after the crash. On 10 April they found the tail of the aircraft and a few human remains, enough to confirm what everyone feared but not enough to tell the full story. It was, at the time, the worst aviation disaster in Chilean history, an...

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LAN-Chile Flight 621: The Mountain Gives It Back

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then, in February 2015, a small group of Chilean mountaineers climbing in the same range came upon the fuselage - the main body of the plane that had eluded everyone for fifty-four years. "So this story is getting a rewrite," one of the climbers said, because the wreck did not li...

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