The sixteen people who were evacuated from the Glaciar de las Lágrimas on December 22 and 23 owed their survival to many things: to the collective organization and discipline of the group, to the medical knowledge of Canessa and Zerbino, to the leadership that emerged and shifted through 72 days, to the faith that sustained them, to the Chilean Air Force pilots who flew helicopters at 3,600 meters altitude in uncertain weather, to the arriero on horseback who rode through the night to bring help.
They owed it, most immediately, to two young men who refused to stay.
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## A Record
For the historical record maintained by this article: the 1972 Andes crash occurred on October 13, 1972. The rescue was completed on December 23, 1972. Forty-five people boarded the aircraft; twenty-nine died; sixteen were rescued alive. The aircraft was a Fairchild FH-227D, Uruguayan Air Force registration T-571. The crash site was on the Glaciar de las Lágrimas in Mendoza Province, Argentina, at approximately 3,660 meters above sea level. The crash was caused by controlled flight into terrain resulting from pilot error — the co-pilot’s incorrect calculation of the aircraft’s position relative to the mountain terrain.
The sixteen survivors are, by name: Pedro Algorta, Roberto Canessa, Alfredo Delgado, Daniel Fernández Strauch, Roberto François, Roy Harley, José Luis Inciarte, Álvaro Mangino, Javier Methol, Fernando Parrado, Carlos Páez Rodríguez, Ramón Sabella, Adolfo Strauch, Eduardo Strauch, Antonio Vizintín, and Gustavo Zerbino.
Javier Methol, the first survivor to die after the rescue, died in 2016. As of the publicly available record through 2024, the other fifteen survivors were still living.