Guillaumet’s Crash in the Andes
The airmail pilot Guillaumet was forced down by a snowstorm in the winter Andes and survived by walking for five days over snow-covered mountains.
L'Aéronautique · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source
On 13 June 1930 Henri Guillaumet, carrying the mail from Santiago in Chile to Mendoza in Argentina across the Andes, was caught in a snowstorm and brought his biplane down by a lake near Laguna del Diamante. He sheltered under the plane for two days, then walked for five days through freezing mountain passes until at last he met a farmer.
His friend Saint-Exupéry, then running Aéropostale’s operations in Argentina, flew over the mountains every day searching for him. “What I did,” the rescued Guillaumet said, “I swear no animal would have done” — and Saint-Exupéry told the story in Wind, Sand and Stars.
