When the helicopters appeared over the valley rim, some survivors had already given up on the possibility. The experience of watching rescue aircraft approach — the sound of the rotors, the sight of the aircraft descending into the valley where they had spent 72 days — is described in multiple survivor accounts as something that exceeded the capacity of language to capture.
There were sixteen survivors at the crash site. The helicopters could carry only a limited number at a time given the altitude and weight constraints. On December 22, the first helicopter flights carried out eight survivors. Four rescuers remained at the crash site overnight with the other eight who could not be evacuated that day.
On December 23, 1972, the remaining eight survivors were evacuated. The last person left the crash site 72 days after the aircraft had come to rest on the glacier.
—
## What They Came Home To
The rescue became international news almost immediately. December 23 is one day before Christmas, and the story of sixteen survivors of an air crash in the Andes — people who had been declared dead two months earlier — arriving home alive was the kind of story that the world’s news media deployed immediately and completely.
The public understanding of the story at the moment of rescue was incomplete. The survivors came home saying that they had survived, that they had been in the mountains for 72 days, that they had tried and failed to signal aircraft and to build a radio, that two of their number had walked out and found help. What the public did not know, in the first days, was how they had eaten.