When a LAN Chile DC-3 went missing in the Andes in April 1961 with 24 people on board, rescuers found the tail section, but then abandoned the recovery effort. It was clear there were no survivors, and searching on the steep, remote, glacier-topped mountainside was dangerous. This week, a nine-member expedition team announced that it has found the main part of the fuselage, at nearly 10,000 feet ASL. The climbers traveled two days on horseback, then another two days on foot to reach the site. “You could feel the very potent energy of the place,” said expedition leader Leonardo Albornoz. “You could breathe in the sadness.”
The airplane carried among its passengers eight members of a top-ranked Chilean soccer team, whose symbolic funerals drew enormous crowds in Chile at the time. Mountaineers said the site where they found the wreckage was not where official publications indicated it should be, but they declined to identify the site, to protect it from looters. This crash was not the widely publicized Andes crash that inspired the book “Alive,” which occurred in 1972 and involved a rugby team.
