Qualla: Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wunabbis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Forty-five people boarded the chartered Fairchild in Montevideo on a Friday the thirteenth, most of them young, most of them laughing. They were a rugby club called the Old Christians, flying to Santiago for a match, and they had brought along friends and family to make a weekend of it. None of them could have known that twenty-nine would not come home, or that the survivors would spend seventy-two days on a frozen mountainside writing one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of human endurance. This place, a nameless slope near the Chilean border, would come to be called the Valle de las Lágrimas: the Valley of Tears.

Image: Wunabbis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: A Wrong Turn in the Clouds

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maitane Azurmendi, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Andes are not a single ridge but a vast, crumpled wall, and in October the storms hide the peaks behind cloud. The co-pilot believed the aircraft had passed Curicó, the waypoint where it should have turned north toward Santiago, and began his descent. He was wrong by dozens o...

Image: Maitane Azurmendi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: The Mathematics of Staying Alive

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolasrnphoto, CC BY-SA 4.0. There was almost nothing to eat. A little chocolate, some wine, scattered snacks rationed into crumbs that lasted only days. The search planes that crossed overhead could not see a white fuselage against white snow, and after eight days the searching stopped. The survivors heard ...

Image: Nicolasrnphoto | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: The Avalanche and the Long Dark

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wunabbis, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the sixteenth night, an avalanche poured down the slope and buried the fuselage where everyone slept. Eight more people died, smothered in the snow inside the shelter that was supposed to protect them. Those who dug free now faced the depths of the southern winter at altitude,...

Image: Wunabbis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: Two Boys and a River

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit เดลินิวส์, Public domain. By December, two of the survivors, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, understood that no one was coming. They sewed insulation into a crude sleeping bag and set out west on foot, climbing a peak that nearly killed them, then descending for ten brutal days into a green valley they...

Image: เดลินิวส์ | Public domain

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: What the Mountain Keeps

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BoomerKC, Public domain. The survivors buried their dead at the crash site in a common grave and set the wreckage alight, though the snow-covered bottom of the fuselage remained when Eduardo Strauch returned in 1995. In 2006, families raised a simple black monument to those who lived and died there. Toda...

Image: BoomerKC | Public domain