Fernando Parrado was only 22 years old when there was a plane crash that killed 29 people. Most of the passengers were part of the rugby team, flew with friends and families for a match in Santiago. Only 16 passengers, including Fernando, managed to escape - but at what cost!.

Mother, sister and best friend of Fernando died as a result of this plane crash. In the first days after the crash, 27 people remained with the seriously wounded. In a month the group decreased to 16. They had to wait 72 days for help in difficult conditions in the mountains, without water and food, among the snows.

On the 61st day of waiting, Parrado and his companion Roberto Kanessa set off on the mountains and ten days later they met a Chilean farmer who told the authorities about the crash. So Parrado saved himself and 15 people.

Now he tells an incredible story about survival and about the love of his father, who helped him not give up, despite inhuman difficulties.

In a cold and cruel wind, walking among the mountain slopes, in the absence of elementary chances for life, Fernando was sure that he was doomed: "There was simply no way out. Until the last minute of the 72nd day, I was sure that I would die. When you wait for death for such a long period of time, fear does not disappear ... I was so afraid that I was sick every day. I was a walking dead man, and hope only prolonged the agony ".

Warm clothing was scarce, food - too. Survivors tried to escape from the cold in the wreckage of the destroyed Fairchild FH-227D.

The cruelest decision they had to take was to eat the bodies of dead friends.

"Hunger is the most primitive human fear. When your body begins to "eat itself" from hunger, you feel how the forces go away. It kills you, - recalls Fernando. "The only food we had was dead bodies".

The conditions in which the victims were found left no time for hesitation. "If you have two options, you can analyze and reflect. In the hunger and horror of the impending doom was only one option. The choice is easier than you might think. Because this is the only way to survive, "says Parrado, 45 years after the tragedy.

"I'm very pragmatic," he explains, his ability to tell impartially about a catastrophe and painful survival. - I was brought up by my father, the king of pragmatism. As soon as this test was over, on the very first day my father told me: "Listen, Nando, you can not change the past. Do not destroy your new life given to you from above. Live ».

Currently, Parrado lives in Montevideo. He is a successful television producer and head of a thriving network of home appliances stores. He has been married for 37 years, he has two wonderful daughters and two little grandchildren.

Fernando looks confident in himself, held a man. But he was not always that way: until the plane crash, Parrado was very shy, and only his childhood friend helped him cope with embarrassment.

October 13, 1972 Flight 571 flew from Mendoza (Argentina) to the south towards the pass in the Andes, which was low enough that the aircraft overcame it. The tragedy was due to pilot error - Fairchild hit the right wing plane of the mountain range and then collapsed in the air.

Sister, mother and friend Fernando died within days after the remnants of the fuselage collapsed near the Chilean border. Parrado was left unconscious for two days because of a head injury, but on the third day he came to himself. Five days later, 20-year-old sister Fernando - Suzanne.

"I found something there. I discovered anger, something I had never felt before. Probably, he gave me strength. Anger because I buried my mother with my own hands, my sister, my friends. I stopped feeling anything.. No sorrow, no tears. Nothing.

I realized that I should not suffer, I could not afford it, "says Fernando.

Only after the funeral of his sister, he was able to realize the scale of the whole situation and then realized that he was also doomed. This thought did not leave him until the last day in the Andes, along with a passionate desire to return to his father.

It was this desire that ultimately saved the whole group when Parrado and his friend decided on a 60-kilometer walk across the mountains to meet people.

Source: My planet.