None of them had asked to become that kind of story.
—
## The Flight
The Old Christians Club was a Uruguayan rugby team founded by alumni of Stella Maris College, a school in Montevideo run by the Irish Christian Brothers. The rugby team had a tradition of traveling to play matches in Argentina and Chile, and in October 1972 they had arranged to fly to Santiago to play a Chilean team.
The flight was chartered through the Uruguayan Air Force, which operated commercial passenger services alongside its military functions. The aircraft was a Fairchild FH-227D, a twin-turboprop regional aircraft with registration T-571 — from which the flight took its designation. The aircraft had a crew of five, commanded by Colonel Julio César Ferradas with Lieutenant Colonel Dante Héctor Lagurara as co-pilot.
Of the 40 passengers, 19 were members of the Old Christians Club rugby team. The other 21 were a mix of relatives and friends who had come along for the trip: team supporters, the club’s physician Dr. Francisco Nicola and his wife Esther Horta Pérez de Nicola, the mothers of some players, Javier Methol and his wife Liliana, and a number of young men who were friends or relatives of the rugby players. The passengers ranged in age from 18 to their early 40s. Several of them, including Nando Parrado, had brought family members. Parrado’s mother Eugenia and his sister Susana were both on the flight.
It is worth establishing this clearly: the group that survived in the Andes was not a team. It was an improvised community of people who had different reasons for being on that plane, different relationships with one another, different physical conditions, and different abilities to contribute to the collective effort of staying alive. The rugby players had athletic fitness and team discipline as an advantage. The non-athletes brought other things: Javier Methol, the oldest survivor at 36, brought maturity and emotional stability. The two medical students in the group — Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino — brought anatomical knowledge that would prove essential. What they all shared, in the end, was the fact of being there.