Goofs

When the Chilean Air Force helicopters arrive to rescue the survivors, a civilian who looks like a member of the media starts capturing a reel of the rest of the plane and the survivors waving their hands. In reality, it wasn't a journalist who did this, but a member of the Air Force. The helicopter rescue was a hazardous trip in itself. The copters only had space to fit the survivors. A Chilean television crew loaned a camera to the copilot of one of the helicopters so he could shoot the images.

There is a conversion error in the English dub. They translate "in a span of minutes the temperature dropped 30 degrees (C)" to "in a span of minutes the temperature dropped 86 degrees (F)". They converted the absolute temperature 30C to 86F and not the magnitude of a temperature change 30C to 54F.

In the movie, both wings instantly break off when hitting the mountaintop. In reality, the right wing was broken off first. When the plane hit the mountain the second time, the left wing broke off. Eyewitnesses and evidence stated that the plane hat struck the mountain twice or thrice, not only once like in the movie.

Seventeen days after the crash, the avalanche actually struck the fuselage of the plane at midnight when everyone was asleep. In the film, it happens during the day while everyone is having a jovial conversation.

After they eat their first warm meal on the ranch in Chile, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa are surprised with the sudden arrival of the police and several media crews. In fact, Parrado and Canessa had already spoken to a small television crew that bypassed security and recorded their testimonies before riding a horse back from the mountain to deliver their tapes to the station, bumping into the media pool appearing on the movie.

The camera used for pictures in the film by the survivors is an Olympus Pen (EE series). This camera takes "half-frame" shots, meaning vertical photos, not horizontal ones like the ones in the film.

The helicopters that perform the rescue in the mountain scenes (Bell 412) aren't the same models (Bell UH-1H) that are shown when the protagonists get to the valley.

The families are shown watching the plane take off through a window. The plane's reflection is visible but that's only possible if it's taking off from behind them and not in the direction they're looking.

The survivors pray the "Pater Noster" and say: "Forgive our offenses." The replacement of "offenses" by "debts" was made in 1988 in Spain, and 1992 in Latin America. They should have said "forgive our debts."