A plane crash, cannibalism, and a harrowing 10-day trek: The true story behind Netflix’s ‘Society of the Snow’

The crash

On October 12, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 took off from Montevideo, Uruguay, with 45 people, including 40 passengers and five crew members, on board. The passengers were Old Christians Club amateur rugby team players, their friends and family, who were travelling to Santiago, Chile, for an exhibition match.

The plane, however, soon had to make a landing in Mendoza, Argentina, where it stayed overnight due to bad weather. The next day, on its way to Santiago, the plane went through the snowy Andes. About an hour into the flight, the pilot thought they had reached the destination and began to descend with clearance from air traffic controllers, who didn’t realise that he was wrong. When the plane descended, it crashed directly into the Andes, splitting the aircraft apart.

“We were tossed around as if in a hurricane. I was stunned, dizzy, as the plane made impact and tumbled amid deafening explosions, sliding down the side of the mountain at what felt like supersonic speed. I was gripped by the realisation that our plane had crashed into the Andes—and that I was going to die… I bowed my head, ready for the final blow that would send me into oblivion,” wrote Canessa, who was just 19 years old at the time of the crash, in his book.

The survival

Out of the 45 people on the plane, 12 immediately died due to the crash. Five more died during the first night and another woman passed away around a week later, leaving 27 still alive. The survivors turned the fuselage into a shelter by building a wall of suitcases over the opening to prevent snow from entering the enclosure. They also rationed the found provisions equally, but it lasted for only a week.

Some of the passengers tried eating leather from torn bits of luggage. When their hunger couldn’t be suppressed anymore, they decided to do something unthinkable: eat meat from the dead bodies.

“The four of us, with a razor blade or a shard of glass in hand, carefully cut the clothing off a body whose face we could not bear to look at. We lay the thin strips of frozen flesh aside on a piece of sheet metal. Each of us consumed his piece when he could finally bring himself to,” wrote Canessa.

Things turned worse around 10 days after the crash. The survivors managed to recover a small transistor radio from the plane and heard the news that the search operation had been called off and they were all thought to be dead.

Another disaster struck on October 29, when two consecutive avalanches hit the fuselage and buried it in snow, killing eight more people and trapping the rest inside for three days.

After emerging from under the snow, the passengers decided to search for help. The following weeks were spent training, waiting for the weather to improve and creating the necessary equipment such as a sleeping bag from sewn-together cushions.

On the 61st day, Canessa and two others left the fuselage and 13 of the passengers stayed behind. Before the pilot died, he told the survivors that they were located in the western part of the Andes, near Chile. Therefore, the three men thought they could scale the mountain and land in civilization.

The rescue

After 10 days of harrowing journey, the men encountered a campsite on the opposite side of a river, and were able to draw the attention of a man named Sergio Catalan. The next day, Catalan alerted authorities that there were still survivors and they needed to be rescued.

The military reached the crash site on December 22 but was able to airlift only six out of 14 passengers on the spot due to bad weather. The rest of them were picked up the next day.

“The fact that we’d had to eat our dead to stay alive was irrelevant to my mother. What mattered was that we had never stopped trying to stay alive and had found a way home. ‘You were too young to die. You still have too much life ahead of you,’ she told me,” Canessa wrote.