VSt is a story worthy of the glorious days of Aéropostale and yet it only dates back a few weeks. A Brazilian pilot was lost for 36 days in the Amazon rainforest between January and March 2021. Victim of an engine failure in his Cessna, Antonio Sena, a 36-year-old confirmed pilot, crashed at the end of the race. month of January north of the Amazon River, in the State of Para. Thanks to ” God “, he says, and with the palm trees and acai trees that cushion the shock, he comes out of the crash unscathed. The man also praises the ” long hours of training ” and his “Experience”. “It allowed me to stay calm”, he confided to Figaro who told his story on Tuesday April 6.
Calm down, he will need a full tank, because the man is then only at the beginning of his odyssey. His single-engine crashed in an almost uninhabited area. Around him, a green immensity: forest, forest and more forest, virgin what is more. He fell in the heart of the Maicuru biological reserve, classified for its exceptional biodiversity. But Antonio Sena knows that it harbors an underground life: illegal gold mines thrive there. It is precisely one of them that he had to supply with fuel and equipment with his aircraft.
No question, however, for the pilot to venture into the forest. After all, he managed to send out a distress signal just before his forced landing. Someone must have intercepted him. There is more to wait for help, he believes then. He will spend seven days in the shadow of the carcass of his Cessna. Seven nights of anguish. “I hardly slept, I was alert all the time, I ended up falling from fatigue. Even today, I try to control my sleep disturbed by this whole period ”, he says on a daily basis. Biodiversity is noisy, especially at nightfall, when the entire animal and plant population of the forest seems determined to give voice.
“My priorities: water, shelter, fire”
During the day, Antonio Sena tracks down more reassuring noises, those of military planes that will eventually find him, he wants to believe. Here is one precisely, he saw it, it is certain… Alas! “When I saw he wasn’t coming back, I knew he wasn’t coming back. That’s when I started planning my departure on foot ”, he remembers.
Antonio sets off, gleaning what he can from the wreckage of the plane: water, bread, soda, flashlight, etc. With the sun for only compass. “My priorities have always been water, shelter and fire”, Antonio remembers.
On the menu, cocoa pods, tinamou eggs and fruits
That’s good, the pilot had previously followed a survival course in the rainforest. “I ate whatever I found on my walk. I never stopped to look for something to eat, to try to hunt ”, he said. On the menu, cocoa pods, tinamou eggs, fruits and rainwater and rivers. The man will lose 25 kilos, but he holds on until he finds an encampment of nut pickers, who will be his salvation. Antonio will find that he has only walked 28 kilometers in a month.
From his experience, Antonio Sena draws a new link with the forest. ” Today I have an even greater admiration for the forest because it saved me. If I had fallen in the desert or the sea, I would not have survived that long. If I managed to survive, it is thanks to the forest. ”
