Plane carrying Chile soccer stars found in mountains, 50 years on

Climbers in Chile’s Andes have found the wreckage of a missing plane that disappeared more than half a century ago with a team of soccer stars on board. Images of the twisted wreck of the LAN Chile Douglas DC-3 that went down April 3, 1961 were shown on Chilean television Sunday, released by the climbers who said the find was in Maule, about 300 kilometres south of Santiago.

Quite a bit of the fuselage is still there, a lot of things scattered over the area including human bones.

Leonardo Albornoz, mountaineer.

The plane was carrying 34 people when it crashed, with all presumed dead. Those on board included eight members of the Green Cross football squad, team coach Arnaldo Vasquez, and other team staff and friends who were coming back to Santiago from a match in Osorno. The plane has been missing ever since, but the story until now had been that a LAN pilot had spotted something he said was the footballers’ plane in another location - near the city of Linares.

Andes Americas