This arithmetic — the possibility of a different number — is part of the ongoing reckoning of anyone who thinks carefully about the survival story. The decisions that were made, the timing of the final trek, the speed with which Catalán rode to alert authorities, the weather conditions that allowed the helicopters to fly on December 22 — small changes in any of these variables might have changed the number of survivors. The sixteen who survived are real and their survival is documented. The counterfactual seventeen, or twenty, or more, exist only in the mathematics of possibility.
Turcatti’s body was left at the crash site when the survivors were evacuated. He is buried in the common grave near the fuselage that the Argentine authorities prepared in January 1973.
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## The Rugby Team and the Non-Rugby Passengers
The popular narrative of the 1972 Andes crash often describes the survivors simply as a rugby team. This is an oversimplification that the prompt for this article specifically flags, and it deserves direct attention.
Of the 40 passengers on the flight, 19 were members of the Old Christians Club rugby team. The other 21 were people associated with the team in various ways — relatives, friends, supporters — plus a few individuals who had taken the opportunity of the charter flight for their own travel purposes.
The specific composition of the non-rugby passengers included:
Javier Methol, 36, and his wife Liliana, the only married couple traveling together on the flight. Methol was not a rugby player; he was a friend of some of the players who had come along as a supporter.