Plane crash survivor shares why he thinks his friend wanted to eat the pilot first

A plane crash survivor from the events which inspired Netflix's Society of the Snow has shared why he thinks his friend wanted to eat the pilot first.

Yes, eat. When their plane crashed in the Andes mountains back in 1972, survivors turned to cannibalism in order to survive.

Carlos ‘Carlitos’ Páez Rodriguez is a survivor of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 plane crash and spend 72 days experiencing extreme cold, avalanches and starvation.

He spoke to LADbible for Minutes With about the experience after the plane crashed at an altitude of 11,170 feet, with only 15 others making it off the mountain.

Carlitos said that the group were starving and after the food they had recovered from the plane ran out, it became unbearable.

He described: “All you feel is pain in your stomach and you know if you don’t eat, you’ll die.”

And desperate times call for desperate measures, as the survivor ‘realised everyone was simultaneously’ arriving at the same idea but ‘not saying anything’.

The ‘idea’ in question? Eating the flesh of their fellow passengers who had not survived.

LADbible

“The first person I heard say it out loud was Nando Parrado when I told him there was nothing left in the food store,” he recalled.

“And he said, ‘Carlitos, I’d eat the pilot.’ Which was a very natural thing for him to say because he’d lost his mother and his sister in the crash, so consciously or not, he had something against the pilot.”

Carlitos reckon this ‘natural conclusion’ would have came to anyone.

“And what’s more,” he added, “We didn’t know the crew. All the others were our friends.”

The survivor realised he’d ‘also been thinking it’, but as he was the youngest of them all he ‘didn’t dare say it’.

Netflix

However, he was right, everyone was having the same idea.

Carlitos explained: “I mentioned it to Adolfo Strauch in an act of complete cowardice, I threw Nando under the bus.

“I said, ‘Adolfo, Nando’s crazy, he wants to eat the pilot.’ And Adolfo said, ‘No Carlitos. He’s not so crazy. My cousins and I had the same idea.’

"When we got the news on day 10 that the search had been called off, that’s when it started to dawn on us all at the same time that our only possible option was to feed on our dead travel companions because there was no other way.”

When the survivors learned the rescue efforts had been called off and they discovered they were unable to signal to anyone they decided to send people out to seek help and eventually a team were able to make it back to civilisation.

The plane had crashed on 13 October 1972 and the last of the survivors were evacuated off the mountain on 23 December.

You can watch Society of the Snow on Netflix.