VARIG: The Transatlantic Routes, c.1970

 

Remaining as Lusophone as our last post, here is a snippet of a folded, full-color map with the red routes of the storied Brazilian airline VARIG spanning across, sometime about half a century ago. In the analog era it was rather common for airlines to display their networks on commercially-available cartography rather than commissioning a custom graphic. 

This diagram demonstrates a now-bygone era when Rio de Janeiro's Galeão Airport was the country's primary intercontinental gateway, before it was eclipsed in the mid-1980s by São Paulo's new Guarulhos International.

What can be made out from this odd clipping are a web of long lines connecting Brazil to Europe, presumably several cities in Portugal besides just Lisbon, one of which apparent stops in Sal in the Cape Verde Islands (see previous post). 

A more unusual routing links the West African coast at Monrovia-Robertsfield, before continuing straight northward for what may be Lisbon or even Madrid. This way station existed for many years, the nadir of which was the tragic 1967 crash of VARIG Flight 837, a DC-8 on a Beirut-Rome-Monrovia-Recife-Rio routing. 

Once the links are received in Rio, a busy web of regional routes fans back out towards Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, and Asunción. São Paulo seems a but a minor pit stop on the way to other places. A somewhat thinner red marking traces the vast Brazilian coast, linking Rio with Salvador, Recipe, Natal, and Belem, while an interior hop reaches the new capital, Brasilia. 

VARIG: South American Network, 1973

Brazil dominates commercial aviation in South America today, but four decades ago Rio de Janeiro was the primary gateway to the continent's southern cone, with Sao Paulo just another way station on the routes to Asuncion and Santiago, without, apparently so much as a link to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, at least not on VARIG. Manaus is a more important gateway, with connections to Bogota and Mexico City via Panama, as well as an Andean-hopper terminating at Iquitos, Peru. Recife and Salvador, and Belem all have flights into Europe, with the latter also linked to Cayenne and Paramaraibo, as well as Miami.

See the previous post for the global view of the VARIG route map of 1973. 

United Air Lines: Dulles to South America, 2002

United often has bolder moves than some of its staid American cousins. Its foray into South America, long the backyard of American Airlines, and Pan Am and Eastern before it, is one such example. Although UAL couldn't make the extension to Montevideo last, the carrier still does the nightly runs to Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires, as well as Rio de Janeiro, which is, somewhat bizarrely, not even featured on this map.

United's mighty Brazilian bond within the Star Alliance, first to the now-fallen VARIG, whose connecting options from Guarlhos are shown above, and newly-ascendant TAM, certainly contributes to the success of the venture. Brazil's ascent as the second economic giant of the Western Hemisphere hasn't hurt, either. Note the Mapquest logo in the corner-- this was the era of web 1.0.