The Survivor: Breaking the Ultimate Taboo to Live

April 27, 2006 -- -- Standing in front of a group of high school students on the outskirts of Dallas, a man named Nando Parrado had an unusual lesson in life and death to share.

"Can you imagine how terrible and slow and horrible is the death sitting down, freezing and looking to your friends," he asked them.

Parrado shared his story in an exclusive interview with "Nightline" and Outside Magazine.

"Let's say that I could close this room, put the temperature to 30 degrees below zero, no lights, nothing ... and let's wait. There's nothing to eat. Who would die first?"

For Parrado this was no mental exercise. He experienced this. His story began on Friday the 13th in October 1972, when he was 22 years old.

That day Parrado and his teammates from the Old Christians Rugby Club boarded a chartered flight from Uruguay to Chile. There was plenty of room to spare, so Perrado's sister and mother joined them, planning to do some shopping and sightseeing abroad.

It was a fateful decision.

The flight followed a course across the snow-covered Andes. But at an altitude of 14,000 feet, and some 250 miles off course, it crashed into the mountains.

"From the moment when I realized there was something wrong," explained Parrado, "to the moment of impact, not more than 10 seconds elapsed."

"I looked through the window and about 25, 30 yards away from the tip of the wing, I saw this black-and-white wall rushing by at the speed of the airplane, mixed with clouds. And that took me three or four seconds to analyze. My brain then says a plane cannot fly that close to a mountain."

The majority of passengers actually survived the initial crash, but Parrado spent the first three days in a coma.

When he came around there were 28 passengers still alive. But then he learned that his mother had died, and his sister Susie was seriously injured.

"They said 'Your mother is dead.' Just like that. And where's my sister? 'Your sister is wounded. She's lying there in the front.' ... It's not that they wanted to be blunt or strong. They were immersed in that dilemma of surviving," he said.