YOU DIE, AND YOU DON’T notice that you’re dying.”
Nando Parrado remembers very little of the plane crash that changed his life on 13 October 1972, but he does remember that. As the airplane — Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 — that was carrying him, his mother, his sister, his teammates in the Old Christians Club rugby union team, and several other passengers and crew members, suddenly found itself struggling for speed and altitude in the Argentinian section of the Andes, Parrado found himself confronting his mortality. “It’s so fast,” he says. “From the moment I realised that there was something wrong to the moment it crashed, it was maybe two seconds, three seconds. It’s incredible how many things you can record on your mind in the last tenth of a second of your life. There was this huge metallic sound, and instantly, everything went black. I died.”