It faithfully reproduces the crash of the FH-227 against the mountain. With The Snow Society, his fifth film, Juan Antonio Bayona brings to the screens, half a century later, a serious plane accident in which 29 of the 45 occupants of a military plane rented by a rugby team died and was quite an ordeal. of resistance for the 16 survivors, rescued from an Andean glacier ten weeks later.
Although the film was filmed mainly in three locations in Sierra Nevada (Granada), Bayona, a perfectionist and conscientious filmmaker, also filmed in Montevideo, at the Carrasco airport and even flew over the Andes and together with a second unit took shots of the area of the accident, which the director himself claims happened 14 times.
The plane that flew between Montevideo and Santiago de Chile on October 13, 1972 flew over that point only once and its remains were left there after the accident. There are several questions that are asked about that flight by those who have seen the story. First, the logic: how the plane could have crashed. Another question is whether the place where they crossed the Andes is a common passage and even if they usually fly over the glacier where the Uruguayan Air Force aircraft was left and there is even the curiosity to know the reason why those civilians were traveling in a military plane.
The trip from Montevideo to Santiago de Chile on October 12, 1972 has always been known as flight 571 and this is how it was identified in the communications between the pilots and the different controllers with whom the plane communicated on the route. However, more than a flight number, the number 571 was the identifier of the aircraft within the Uruguayan Air Force, which at that time had four units of this model: two Fokker F-27 built in Holland and two Fairchild FH227 assembled in the United States. Joined.
The difference between the Americans and the Dutch was that the former had almost two meters more fuselage, which allowed them to carry up to 56 travelers and have a cargo hold with greater capacity. The protagonist of the accident, 571, was the American version of the Dutch plane. At the time of the accident he was four years old and had almost 800 flight hours.
The reason why the Montevideo rugby team along with several friends and family scheduled to fly on a military plane from the capital of Uruguay to Chile was nothing special: the turboprop could be rented. Since the late 1950s, the Uruguayan Air Force had created the so-called TAMU or Uruguayan Military Air Transport to offer regular cargo and passenger services from different air bases and airfields for both military and civilians. It operated like a small airline company. Organized groups, such as sports teams, could also charter, at a reasonable price, a DC-3 or a complete F-27 to fly to any national destination or even reach other neighboring countries such as Paraguay, Argentina or Chile.
A detail that is not explained in the film is that the flight between the two capitals was not direct. It is not a serious problem, since filmically it is a detail that would not contribute anything new and would lengthen the footage unnecessarily. The real trip took off on October 12, 1972 from Carrasco airport with 40 passengers and five crew members: a colonel and a lieutenant colonel were the pilots, a lieutenant was the navigator, a sergeant was a mechanic and another non-commissioned officer served as cabin crew.
The planned stopover was Mendoza, eastern Argentina, where the Fairchild refueled and would continue heading to Chile. However, the weather reports were not encouraging to cross the Andes that day and the pilots decided that passengers and crew would spend the night in Argentina until the next day, when conditions were going to be somewhat better. With the 45 occupants of the plane back on board, the Fairchild took off from Plumerillo airport at two in the afternoon the following day towards its destination, where the Montevideo team was going to play a rugby match with a counterpart from Santiago.
Seen on a map, Mendoza and Santiago de Chile are very close, less than 170 kilometers in a straight line, although between both cities are the Andes, which in this area must be crossed at altitudes of about 26,000 feet, about 7,900 meters. That was very close to the so-called maximum operating ceiling of the FH-227D which was 28,000 feet, about 8,500 meters.
Could he have stopped by? Yes, although reaching that altitude to cross the mountain range meant a lot of time ascending in circles and, in addition, it meant a significant consumption of fuel to immediately begin a continuous descent to Santiago, so it was decided to make a detour to the south and cross the mountain range through a more accessible area at altitude known as El Planchón.
After taking off from Mendoza, the plane flew for 45 minutes south to Malargüe. It flew over it at the cruising altitude of that day: 15,000 feet or 4,500 meters, and then turned west and headed towards the Planchón Pass of just over 2,500 meters, which is also the border between Chile and Argentina. It would fly over that part with a large margin of safety until reaching Curicó (Chile) and from there it would begin the descent to the destination.
Currently, when a jet is destined for Santiago, whether from Buenos Aires or Montevideo, it flies over the Mendoza area at 33,000 or 34,000 feet (just over 10,000 meters) without problem. For their part, the flights between Mendoza and Santiago, currently operated by Airbus, Boeing or Embraer jets, take altitude flying towards the east, the opposite direction of the Andes and after a turn, they fly over the airport from which they departed at a height that It already allows them to cross the mountain range.
The protagonist of flight 571 was a good plane, although with the limitations of being a turboprop for 50 passengers, which made it necessary to take that detour to the south along some airways that still exist today, because not all aircraft that cross the mountain range They are great reactors. From Mendoza to Malargüe the Uruguayan plane followed the U7 airway, today called UW44, and to cross the Planchón the G17, currently known on navigation charts as UB684. He did it under instrumental conditions, without having external references due to the dense cloud cover in the area, taking references in the instrumentation on board the plane and contacting different towers and control centers during the flight.
It was after passing the Planchón that the error occurred: the FH227 should have continued flying in a straight line to Curicó and yet it turned north earlier than it should to enter a mountainous area that was difficult to overcome with the power and altitude that the plane had. 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force. In fact, believing that they had already passed Curicó, they were already descending, which was the opposite of what they needed in that area. They didn’t get over it.
Regarding the causes of this navigation error, it has always been said that the headwind that reduced the speed of the aircraft, inducing the crew to miscalculate the distance traveled. The erroneous reading of the on-board instruments or a malfunction of the VOR/DME radio aid of the device was also raised, which led the Air Force aviators to a fatal error. Another 12 flights did pass through the same area that same October 13, 1972 without any major incident.
What happened next with the famous 571 is now history. A story told in several more or less accurate books and in three films: a Mexican one from 1976, another American one from 1993 and the one directed with mastery and excellent aeronautical judgment by Juan Antonio Bayona in 2023.
