FOR 22-YEAR-OLD NANDO Parrado it was only ever meant to be a pleasant family trip.

He played for a Uruguayan rugby team who had chartered a flight to Santiago in Chile for an exhibition match. He’d asked his mother, Eugenia, and his sister, Susy, if they wanted to come along on the journey – one that meant flying over the Andes in a twin-engine turboprop.

Flight 571 took off on Friday 13 October 1972, and a few of the guys joked that this wasn’t the best day to be flying over a mountain range that can harbour difficult and dangerous weather for pilots. Hot air rises from the foothills and hits cold air at the snow line. The resulting maelstrom is bad news for aircraft.

But their jokes were just that. Jokes. Because the weather reports looked fine.

Weather, though, has a habit of changing very quickly in the mountains. And especially in these mountains. The plane had been in the air just a couple of hours when the pilot was forced to land in the town of Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes.

They overnighted there. Next day, the pilots were in two minds as to whether they should continue the journey. Their passengers wanted to get to their rugby match. They put pressure on the pilots to fly.

Which turned out to be a very bad move.

The turboprop was flying over the Planchon Pass when the turbulence hit. Four sharp bumps. Some of the guys cheered, like they were riding on a rollercoaster. Nando’s mother and sister looked frightened. They were holding hands. Nando himself opened his mouth to reassure them.

But the words didn’t come, as the plane suddenly dropped several hundred feet.

Nobody was cheering any more.

The plane was shuddering violently. Some of the passengers started to scream. Nando’s neighbour, who was sitting by the window, pointed outside. Less than ten metres from the wing tip, Nando could see the mountainside: a huge wall of rock and snow.

His neighbour asked if they should be so close, his voice trembling with dread.

Nando didn’t answer. He was too busy listening to the horrible shrieking of the engines as the pilots desperately tried to gain height. The whole plane was shaking so badly it felt like it was going to break apart.

Nando caught the terrified glances of his mother and sister.

And then it happened.

A violent shudder.

An awful grinding sound as metal twisted against rock. The plane had hit the mountainside. It was being ripped to bits.

Nando looked up. He didn’t see the top of the fuselage. He saw open sky.

He felt cold air on his face.

And saw clouds in the gangway.

There was no time to pray. No time even to think. He felt a tremendous force ripping him from his seat. A violent, deafening noise all around.

Nando Parrado must have been sure he was about to die a grisly, painful, terrifying death.

Then he was plunged into darkness.

*

Nando was unconscious for three days after the crash. So he didn’t see some of the injuries his companions sustained.

One man had been stabbed in the stomach by a steel tube. When his friend tried to remove it, a length of oozing intestine emerged from his gut.

Another man’s calf muscle had torn away from the bone, then twisted about his shin. The leg bone itself was open to the air. His friend had to squash the muscle back in place before bandaging it up.

One woman had been crushed in a pile of seats that nobody could untangle. Her legs were broken and she was yelling in agony. There was nothing that anyone could do, except leave her to die.

Nando’s head had swollen to the size of a basketball. He was still breathing, but nobody expected him to live. He defied his companions’ expectations, though, and awoke from his coma three days later.

He was lying on the floor of the wrecked fuselage where the survivors were huddled. The dead were piled in the snow outside. The wings had been ripped from the plane. So had the tail. They had crashed into a snowy, stony valley, where they could see nothing but the forbidding peaks of the mountains all around them. But for now, all Nando’s attention was on his family.

The news was bad. His mother was dead.

Nando was pierced with grief, but he didn’t allow himself to cry. Tears, he knew, would cost his body salt. Without salt, you die. He had been out of his coma for only minutes, but already he was displaying a refusal to give in.

A determination to survive, no matter what.

Fifteen people had died in that horrific air crash, but Nando’s next thought was for his sister. Susy was alive, but only just. Her face was smeared in blood, her broken body too painful to move given her massive internal injuries. Her feet were already black with frostbite. Delirious, she was calling out for their mother, begging her to take them home, away from the dreadful cold. Nando hugged her for the rest of the day, and all that night, in the hope that his warmth would keep her alive.

But, gradually, the full extent of the danger they were in hit home.

Night-time temperatures in those mountains could reach –40°C. While he was in a coma, the others had packed holes in the fuselage with snow and suitcases to give them some protection from the deathly cold mountain winds. Even so, Nando awoke to find his clothes stuck to his skin. Everybody’s hair and lips were white with frost.

The fuselage – their only shelter – had come to a halt on top of a huge glacier. Even though they were very high up, the mountain peaks that surrounded them were so high they had to crick their necks to see the summits. The air was so thin it burned their lungs. The sun’s rays would blister their skin. The glare of the snow dazzled and blinded them.

They would have had a better chance of survival if they were stranded at sea or in the desert. At least those two environments host life. Up here, nothing could live. No animals. No plants. They rationed the small amounts of food they managed to gather from the cabin and the suitcases. But there was very little, and it soon ran out.

Day turned to freezing night, then back into day again. On the fifth day after the crash, the four strongest survivors decided to try to climb out of the valley. They returned hours later: oxygen-starved, exhausted and utterly defeated. It was impossible, they said.

And ‘impossible’ is a bad word to have in your mind when you’re trying to survive.

*

On the eighth day, Nando’s sister died in his arms. Once more, though racked with grief, he fought back tears.

Nando buried her in the snow. Everything had been taken from him, except one thing: his father, back in Uruguay. He made a silent promise to him that he would not allow himself to die here in the frozen wastes of the Andes.

There was water everywhere, in the form of snow. It soon became unbearably agonizing to eat it, though, because the dry cold had made their lips bloodied and raw. They started to die of thirst, until one of the survivors invented a snow-melting device from a sheet of aluminium. They would pile snow on to it and leave it in the sun to melt.

But no amount of water would bring them back from the brink of starvation.

Their meagre food supplies ran out after a week. At altitude, and in the cold, the human body needs far more nourishment than at sea level, but now they were getting nothing. Very quickly, their bodies started consuming themselves. They needed protein. If they didn’t get it, they’d die. It was as simple as that.

And there was only one source of food available to them now.

The bodies of the dead were lying outside in the snow. Their flesh was perfectly preserved in the sub-zero temperatures. Nando was the first to suggest that they use it to survive. Their only other option was to wait for death to take them, and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

They started with the pilot.

Four of the survivors found shards of glass in the fuselage. They used these to hack strips of flesh from the pilot’s corpse. Nando took a piece. It was frozen hard, of course, and a curious grey-white in colour.

He stared at it in his palm. Around him, he could see some survivors doing the same. Others had already placed the frozen gobbets of human meat into their mouths and were chewing with difficulty.

It’s just meat, he told himself. Nothing more.

He slipped the flesh past his cracked lips and on to his tongue.

It had no taste. Just texture: hard and sinewy. Nando chewed a couple of times, then forced the lump of human meat down his throat.

He didn’t feel guilty. Just angry, that their lives had come to this. And although the flesh didn’t stop the agonizing pangs of hunger, it gave him hope that he might stave off starvation until rescuers found them.

Because every rescue team in Uruguay would be looking for them. Wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t have to continue this gruesome diet for long. Surely?

One of the survivors had found a little transistor radio in the wreckage, which he’d managed to get working. The day after they’d first tasted human meat, they managed to tune in to a news programme.

It told them exactly what they didn’t want to hear. The search for them had been called off. Conditions were too treacherous. There was simply no chance of finding any survivors.

*

‘Breathe,’ they would tell themselves when despair started to grip them. ‘If you breathe, it means you’re alive.’

But now that all hope of rescue was lost, they must have wondered how many more breaths they had in them.

The mountain had more horrors to deliver. The next came in the form of a night-time avalanche. Countless tons of snow slipped over the fuselage in the middle of a winter storm. Large quantities made their way inside the wreckage, covering Nando and many other survivors. Suffocated by their icy blankets, six of them died.

Nando would later compare it to being trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea. A furious storm was blowing, so they didn’t dare venture out, and they didn’t know how much snow had compacted above them. There was every chance that this would be their icy tomb.

The water-melting device no longer worked now they were hidden from the sun. And the only bodies were those of the newly dead.

Before, only those who had cut up the corpses had been forced to watch. Now, all but a few were nearby as the few brave survivors hacked into the dead. The sun had not dried out the flesh of these fresh bodies, so eating their meat was a very different prospect. It was not hard and dry, but squishy and oily.

Raw.

Wet.

It oozed blood, and was full of lumpy gristle. And it was far from tasteless. It took everything Nando and the others had not to gag as they forced wobbling meat down their throats, surrounded by the pungent, sickly stench of festering human fat and tissue.

*

The blizzard ended. It took eight days for the survivors to dig the avalanched snow out of the fuselage.

In the detached tail of the aircraft the survivors knew that there were some batteries, which might allow them to get the plane’s radio working, so they could call for help. Nando and three of his companions journeyed for several painful, exhausting hours across the frozen snow, and eventually found the batteries. In the days that followed they tried to fix the radio, but failed.

In the meantime, the crash site was becoming an increasingly horrific place to be.

To start with, the survivors had limited themselves to small strips of flesh from the bodies of their fallen companions. Some refused to do it, but reports say most came round to the idea when they realized they had no other option. And as time went on, the brutal reality of their diet was there for everyone to see.

Human bones littered the crash site. Amputated arms and legs, the flesh still uneaten, were stacked by an opening to the fuselage – a grisly, but easily accessible, larder. They had stretched large sheets of human fat over the plane to dry in the sun. The survivors had moved on from eating just the flesh, to consuming the offal too. Kidneys. Livers. Hearts. Lungs. They had even cracked open the skulls of the dead in order to scoop out and eat the brain matter inside. The split, empty heads lay discarded in the snow.

Two dead bodies, however, remained untouched. Out of respect for Nando, the others had left the corpses of his mother and his sister unsullied. But Nando knew they couldn’t leave perfectly good food there for long. The time would come when survival would win out over respect. He had to try to fetch help, before he was forced to eat his own family. He had to battle against the mountain.

He knew he would probably die trying. But that was better than not trying at all.

*

They had been stranded for sixty days when Nando and his two companions – Roberto and Tintin – set out to find help. There was no way down from their position. They could only go up. But they did not know that they were about to attempt to scale one of the highest peaks in the Andes – a peak that stretched nearly 17,000 feet above sea level.

Experienced mountaineers would have thought twice about an expedition like this. They certainly wouldn’t have attempted it after sixty days of near-starvation, without the equipment crucial to extreme mountaineering.

Nando and his gritty companions had no crampons, no ice picks, no cold-weather gear. No safety ropes or steel anchors. They wore only the clothes they could cobble together from the suitcases in the wreckage, and they were weak with malnutrition, thirst, exhaustion and exposure. This was the first time they had ever tried to climb a mountain. It didn’t take long for Nando’s inexperience to show.

If you’ve never suffered altitude sickness, you can’t imagine what it’s like. Your head splits with pain. You can barely stand with dizziness. You’re overcome with tiredness. Go too high and you risk brain damage and death. They say you should climb no more than 1,000 feet in a day when you are at altitude, to allow yourself to acclimatize.

Nando and his friends knew none of this. They climbed 2,000 feet in the first morning. Their blood thickened as it tried to conserve oxygen. They hyperventilated. They dehydrated.

They also kept going.

Their only sustenance was scraps of human meat that they had stripped from the bodies of their dead friends and stuffed into an old sock to transport it. But by now, cannibalism was the least of their worries. The biggest problem they had was the sheer magnitude of the task ahead of them.

In their inexperience, they chose the most difficult routes up into the mountains. Nando led the way, and he had to learn advanced mountaineering skills on the job. He had to find his way up impossibly steep gradients covered with sheet ice. He had to avoid deadly couloirs and traverse razor-thin, slippery ledges. When they came across an absolute sheer rock face, hundreds of feet high and covered with compacted snow and ice, Nando didn’t retreat. He used a sharp-tipped stick to carve a stairway up it.

At night, the temperature dropped so low that their water bottle cracked and shattered. Even during the day, the men couldn’t stop shivering from the inhuman cold and their utter exhaustion. They reached the peak of the mountain against all the odds, but the cruel Andes still had another blow to deal. Nando had expected to see beyond the mountain range. Looking around from that incredible vantage point, he saw nothing but other peaks as far as the eye could see.

No green.

No civilization.

No help.

Nothing but snow, ice and rock.

When you’re fighting to survive, morale is everything. Despite the disappointment, Nando didn’t allow himself to be downhearted.

He could make out two smaller peaks whose tips were not covered in ice. Was this a good sign? Perhaps they indicated the edge of the mountain range? But they were, he estimated, 50 miles away. They didn’t have enough human meat for all three of them to continue the journey. And so Tintin, the weakest of the three, was sent back to the crash site so that Nando and Roberto could continue. It took him only an hour to slide back to his friends in the fuselage.

They were descending now, towards the clouds, putting themselves at the mercy of not only the mountain, but also gravity. Nando fell, and tumbled into walls of ice. His thin, weakened body was bruised and battered. Still he and Roberto went on, forcing themselves to put one step in front of another, even though they were in exhausted agony.

As they lost height and the temperature increased, the human meat they had stashed in the sock started to thaw and putrefy. The stench of the rotting flesh was bad enough, but it was also becoming apparent the meat was inedible. If they didn’t find help soon, they would simply waste away.

On the ninth day of their trek, however, their luck changed. They saw a man.

On the tenth day, the man brought help.

He also brought supplies. Nando and Roberto ate their first hot, non-human food for seventy-two days. More importantly, they gave the local police the message they had crossed the Andes to deliver. ‘I come from a plane that fell into the mountains … In the plane there are still fourteen injured people.’

And on 22 and 23 December, thanks to Nando and Roberto’s stubborn refusal to be beaten, and just in time for Christmas, a helicopter airlifted the remaining survivors to safety.

Of the forty-five people on that dreadful flight, sixteen survived. The greatest wonder is that there were not more deaths.

*

Many people, when they hear the story of Nando Parrado and his desperate companions, take away nothing but a grisly tale of human cannibalism. Some people even criticize them for the decision they took.

They’re wrong, of course.

In one of their darkest moments, the survivors made a pact with each other. If any of them died, they gave permission for the others to eat their bodies. Because they knew that, in eating the meat of their dead companions, they weren’t showing a disregard for human life. They were showing just how precious it is. So precious that they were willing to do anything to cling to it as an unimaginably harsh environment did its best to rip it from them.

The survivors of Flight 571 showed remarkable courage, ingenuity and, I think, dignity. They demonstrated a fact as old as life itself: that when death seems almost certain, one of the most human reactions is a refusal to lie down and let it win.

JULIANE KOEPCKE: CAULDRON OF HELL

‘I’m falling, slicing through the sky … about two miles above the earth.’

JULIANE KOEPCKE