A tragic photo is the final picture taken before plane passengers died in the disaster which inspired a Netflix film.
Back in 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes mountains at an altitude of 11,170 feet.
There were 45 people on the flight on 13 October but just 27 initially survived the crash.
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As depicted in Netflix’s popular Society of the Snow, the survivors spent 72 days experiencing the extreme cold temperatures, avalanches and starvation.
When the survivors were finally rescued, only 16 men made it off the mountain alive. And before that fatal crash and the extreme conditions that compelled them to turn to cannibalism, a final snap seems to show the passengers chilling on the flight.
Said to be the last photo before the crash, the passengers are casually chatting to each other and relaxing as they flew from Montevideo, Uraguay to Santiago, Chile.
The plane was carrying five crew members and 40 passengers, including members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team, along with friends, family and supporters.
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Poor weather conditions contributed to the pilot mistakenly thinking he was lost and overshot his flight path, even though he hadn’t.
And then by changing course, the plane ended up in the wrong place and the pilot attempted to descend in preparation for a landing.
He hadn’t realised he was still flying through the Andes and headed for a mountain.
Crashing at around 3:30pm local time, air traffic control lost contact with the plane which lost its wings and tail cone on impact.
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Three crew members and nine passengers died in the crash, and rescue efforts for the survivors initially started looking in the wrong place as the final known location was incorrect.
Survivor Carlos ‘Carlitos’ Páez Rodriguez previously spoke to LADbible for Minutes With about the experience.
He explained how he and his fellow survivors were starving and after the food they had recovered from the plane ran out, it became unbearable.
Carlitos described: “All you feel is pain in your stomach and you know if you don’t eat, you’ll die.”
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And desperate times call for desperate measures, as he soon ‘realised everyone was simultaneously’ arriving at the same idea despite ‘not saying anything’.
The ‘same idea’ in question? Eating the flesh of the passengers who had not survived the crash.
“The first person I heard say it out loud was Nando Parrado when I told him there was nothing left in the food store,” he recalled.
“And he said, ‘Carlitos, I’d eat the pilot.’ Which was a very natural thing for him to say because he’d lost his mother and his sister in the crash, so consciously or not, he had something against the pilot.”
Jess Battison