Brazil: Life on the Fly

Home for the busy man about Brazil these days is where he unfastens his seat belt. In an ordinary, mill-of-the-runway week, one Cabinet minister spends Monday and Tuesday in the new capital of Brasilia, Wednesday through Friday at his office in the old capital of Rio de Janeiro, and flies home for the weekend in São Paulo. Publishing Executive João Calmon easily logs 30 flights a month, “which means,” he says casually, “that I take off and land practically every day.” A sudden crush of crises in his work recently compelled one labor leader to fly between Rio and São Paulo four times in a single day. Former President Juscelino Kubitschek, the man who sited Brasilia out in the outback, has just clocked his 40,000th airborne hour, or nearly five years of his life spent up in the air. Poor Oscar Niemeyer, the brilliant architect of Brasilia, so hates flying that whenever he has to go home to Rio, it takes him two days by car. He is one of the few holdouts.

Many Brazilians have become confirmed air commuters, but then they have no choice. Their nation is bigger than the continental U.S., and its important cities are scattered hundreds and thousands of miles apart. To make matters even more mobile, Brazil has not one capital but three: the political capital of Brasilia, the cultural and communications capital of Rio, and the industrial capital of São Paulo (see map). Few business deals or political maneuvers can be arranged without touching all three bases.

Where Is Everybody? The inevitable result is a family home in one city, a stopover apartment in another and offices in all three. The scramble around the infernal triangle jams airports, exhausts the commuters, gives waiting wives grey hairs. Important Brazilians are the hardest-to-find group of people since Atlantis sank. “I’m sorry, he just left for Brasilia” is the familiar refrain of harried secretaries.

In 1959, to handle the crush of travelers, three of the biggest carriers joined to run a shuttle between Rio and São Paulo — the first successful air shuttle in the world. Called an “air bridge,” it provides nonreservation flights that take off every 20 minutes during rush hours, carrying more than 2,000 passengers a day. Air bridges also reach from Rio to Brasília and to the inland industrial city of Belo Horizonte. Last year the country’s eight heavily subsidized commercial airlines carried 4,000,000 passengers nearly 2 billion passenger-miles; only U.S. and Canadian airlines in the free world cope with more domestic traffic in a year.

The most unpopular point on the triangle is Brasilia, which only six years ago was nothing but wilderness and a gleam in the eye of then President Kubitschek. Now it is a city of architectural splendor and 300,000 people, most of whom would rather be somewhere else. Housing is scarce, and so is night life. About one-third of the 475 Congressmen and Senators still maintain homes in Rio, a few war ministry bureaucrats even commute daily from Rio, and the foreign ministry, still based in Rio, keeps only a handful of clerks in Brasilia.

All Those Contacts. Out of boredom, government officials work late to “help pass the time.” Out of loneliness, well, one little thing often leads to another. Single girls, attracted to Brasilia by double wages as government secretaries, find some of the fringe benefits exciting. Says one little thing: “I came to Brasilia to make contacts, and wow, am I ever making contacts.”

Comes Thursday evening in Brasilia, barring the gravest of national emergencies, the city empties as if somebody had pulled a plug. Congressmen slip out of the chamber, pick up their tickets at handy airline booths right in the lobby of the Congress building, and rush to catch the 7:30 Electra to Rio.