Two Days Less to Rio

On a plateau high above the vast, unexplored forests of central Brazil last week workmen were putting the finishing touches to a brand-new Pan American Airways airport. What seagoing Pan Am was doing so far from the seacoast was best explained by a sheaf of papers on the desk of Brazil's Dictator-President Getulio Vargas, awaiting his signature. Signed, they would permit Pan Am to lop two days off its five-day, 5,777-mile run from Miami down to Rio de Janeiro.

Month ago Pan Am put its fast new Boeing Stratoliners (land planes) on the over-water flight from Miami to Belem, Brazil, abandoning the overnight stop at Trinidad, resting overnight only at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Next week Douglas DC-35 will take over from Belem, fly 1,530 miles across country to Rio in nine hours, pausing briefly halfway at the new forest-shrouded airport at Barreiras. Abandoned will be the old two-day, 2,525-mile route along the seacoast with its overnight stop at Recife.

No Pan Amian was more pleased at the imminence of the new schedule last week than reticent, wiry, red-haired F. M. Blotner, Pan Am's Brazil operations manager. It had been his baby for nine years. An Ohio-born, World War I, U. S. Navy flier, he went to work for Pan Am in Cuba in 1929 after losing his shirt trying to operate his own airline between Miami and Nassau. Transferred to South America, he was struck by the absence of strong and prevailing winds, of storms, heavy rains and bad weather in interior Brazil. He sounded out his superiors on the possibilities of an inland air route. They told him to explore it.

By passenger train, narrow-gauge freight, shaky Chevrolet, pack train and Indian dugout, Explorer Blotner went into the interior in 1931, came out with information on weather, topography, disposition of the natives. Three years later, on an aerial survey of the projected route, his pilot got lost, ran out of gas, made a forced landing in the wilderness. Airman Blotner might still be there if a Brazilian geographic expedition hadn't happened along, lent him some gas which got his ship to Belem.

By 1937 Pan Am had decided on the inland route. Blotner sent an unaeronautical engineer to Barreiras to find a landing field for a stop between Belem and Rio. The engineer chose a spot about three miles from town, laid out its boundaries. Last Spring an expedition cleared one runway so Pan Am engineers could fly in to finish the job. When they got there, they found that the engineer had ignored the shelf of a plateau rising 1,000 feet from the edge of the field. By some deft sideslipping the pilot got in. The engineers went to look for a new field.

They didn't have far to go. Scrambling up the jagged side of the plateau to get a look at the countryside, the Pan Am engineers were astonished to find a surface so flat that little more than smoothing and a bit of leveling were needed. Above the malaria level, the airport surface is so hard that a spike can scarcely be driven into it. As yet, the engineers have found no nearby water supply. After building a road up the steep face of the plateau, Pan Am hired 380 natives (all who could be found and persuaded to work) to build hangars and clear two 6,200-foot runways. Those with malaria worked three hours a day; those without, five hours. Because they had no place to spend their wages. Pan Am brought in clothing, iceboxes, mosquito nets to give them something to work for. Close to completion last week, Barreiras airport is, in the opinion of Pan Amian Blotner, the finest landing field in the Western Hemisphere. It is also an excellent potential base for U. S. Army planes.

Last week Pan Am went ahead with plans for improving its new route. In the Lockheed shops at Burbank, Calif, new land planes were building--four-motored, high-altitude Excaliburs with an average cruising range of 1,500 miles, 247-m.p.h. cruising speed (at 12,000 ft.). On the drawing boards was Pan Am's plane of the future -- a 300-m.h.p. transport which could leave Rio early one morning, arrive at Miami the same evening. Pan Am hopes it will make possible a trip from Rio to Manhattan in 24 hours, a journey which by water takes twelve days.

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