“The windshield fogged up and he was blinded”: a personal friend of Sebastián Piñera recounted the details of the fatal accident

Sebastiano Pinera He died of “submersion asphyxia” after the helicopter he was driving crashed into Lake Ranco, located about 900 kilometers south of Santiago. This is the exact information that emerged from the autopsy performed on former president of Chile. However, the causes of the fatal accident remain a question mark and this was underlined by Fabio Valdés, a lifelong personal friend of the two-time Trans Andean president.

“Yesterday morning they went to the Cox house and, at lunchtime, they said ‘now let’s go back.’ It’s a seven minute helicopter ride, very short.Time It was drizzling, not that there was terrible rain. The clouds were high, there was no wind. And according to Cox, who is also a pilot, it was not reckless to make that seven-minute round trip,” is how he describes the man who had known Piñera since he was 5 years old.

He then provided important information in reference to the collapse of the bomb: “Apparently the windshield, so to speak, of the helicopter, completely fogged up and “he went blind”.

“100 meters from the house Cox tried to get back on land, go back to the beach. There, perhaps, for a bad maneuver or a rush, I don’t know very well That thing, due to the circumstances it was experiencing, almost blind, fell into the helicopter and fell onto its side. She fell to his side.. And he must have received the blow,” Valdés said in statements to Radio Agricoltura, where he previously held the position of president of the board of directors.

Then, he explained how, according to his version of events, the three survivors managed to get off the ship: “There, Ignacio Guerrero, who was with him, on the other side of the helicopter, the side not attached to the water, opened the doors: “He went out, his son came out, ‘Pichita’, Sebastián’s sister, just came out.”

“They tried to pull Sebastián out, but the helicopter was half sunk Sebastián was half sunk and they couldn’t get him out“, he said of the ship which crashed on Tuesday around 3pm and remained submerged for almost 30 metres.

Previously, Valdés, Piñera’s schoolmate and who confessed to having been afraid of helicopters before this tragedy, said he had asked the former Chilean president to be cautious when boarding.

“Many times I told him ‘Sebastián, be careful, this thing is dangerous‘. But he had a lot of confidence in himself, he was also lucky, because he had other misadventures from which he emerged unscathed,” he commented.

“Without a belt and on the side of the helicopter”: what the diver who found Piñera’s body said

Ricardo González, a member of the Lago Ranco fire brigade who found the body of Sebastián Piñera, told how the body of the former Chilean president was pulled from the bottom of the body of water.

“It was not complex, since the weather conditions, the temperature, the water, the wind, the depth and the seabed, were favorable for free diving,” González said in statements reproduced by La Tercera de Chile.

He also said that Piñera “He was free, without a belt, on the side of the helicopter28 meters deep” and that from the moment he dived into the water until he pulled the body out “about 10 minutes passed”.

“When we arrived on site, witnesses and relatives again told us that the person trapped was him, the former president. “They remained on land and there were two divers in the boat.”

Piñera’s body began to be buried this Wednesday in the Hall of Honor of the former National Congress, in the Chilean capital. The ceremony will continue on Thursday, while on Friday the body will be transferred to La Moneda and then to the Metropolitan Cathedral, in the capital’s Plaza de Armas, for the celebration of tributes.