On the afternoon of October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force Fairchild turboprop carrying 45 people crossed into the Andes Mountains and did not come out the other side.
The aircraft struck a ridge at high altitude. The tail section tore away. Both wings were ripped off. The fuselage, now a metal tube without wings or controls, skidded down a snow-covered glacier for roughly 725 meters before stopping. When it finally came to rest in a remote valley near the Chilean border, twelve of the 45 people aboard were already dead or dying. The remaining survivors found themselves at approximately 3,660 meters above sea level, surrounded by walls of snow and rock, with no radio contact, no cold-weather gear, and no food beyond what had been packed in the cabin for a short charter flight.
The search for them lasted eight days. Then it stopped. The official conclusion was that no one could have survived.
Seventy-two days after the crash, sixteen people were rescued alive.
What happened between October 13 and December 23, 1972, remains one of the most documented and closely studied survival stories of the twentieth century. It is a story about the limits of the human body, about collective decision-making under extreme duress, about the specific way that a group of young men organized themselves to stay alive when every reasonable expectation said they would not. It is also a story about one of the most difficult ethical decisions a group of human beings has ever been asked to make together — a decision they made, in private, with no precedent and no outside guidance, and then defended publicly when the world found out.