Wings across the Amazon

Every Friday in Lent a mule without a head, mula sem cabec,a, flies around Brazilian back-country towns, terrifying the peasants. With every movement of the trees, with every blowing paper, people stand still, sure they have seen the mula. At night they hear it bray and gallop over the roofs. Until recently, the phantom mule was the only extraterrestrial thrill most Brazilians ever had.

But air transportation is changing all that. Last week a Panair do Brasil plane glided into a new airfield in the town of Governador Valladares, in inland Minas Gerais state. Aboard were the atabrine, antiseptics and insecticides that the U.S.-and Brazilian-sponsored SESP (Servigo Especial da Saude Publica) now flies to 32 backwoods outposts, from, the Amazon to the Mato Grosso. Crowds watched the plane come in. In other "lost towns" other crowds watched the landings of planes of Cruzeiro, Vasp, Aerovias do Brasil.

The air age has also stimulated trade in the back country. Example: rubber is flown out, radios, canned food, tools, clothing are flown in. The result: poor towns take on new life.

Air and the Archipelago. Brazilians like to point out that their vast country is really an archipelago of widely scattered population islands that only airlines can tie together. It used to take 13 days, by the quickest transportation, to get from Rio to Manaus near the mighty Amazon. Now, with stops along the way, flying boats and land planes cover the 2,000 miles in two days. Planes cut the distance to doctors in a country short of skilled specialists. A hundred lively aero-clubs, sponsored by the Government, have brought planes to many parts of Brazil before the motorcar; some 600 airfields have been built.

Last week, Brazilian aviation was busting out all over. It took but three planes to start a commercial airline, and stock deals, franchise fights and cutthroat competition recalled the dash, vision and buccaneering spirit of 19th Century U.S. railroading.

The boom had been touched off last fall when Aerophile U.S. Ambassador Adolf A. Berle Jr. fetched two dozen brand-new U.S. Army C-47s (military version of the Douglas DC-3) south to be sold as surplus property. Most of the planes went to big carriers like Cruzeiro and Panair, whose routes along the coast and across the heartland cover three times the mileage of any U.S. domestic airline. But others were bought by rugged individualists who quickly formed companies and sold stock, sometimes before getting franchises.

Rich, young Sportsman Vicente Mamano Neto and two friends decided to cash in on experience gained in wartime anti-U-boat patrols, started a service on the lucrative Rio-Sao Paulo run. The up & coming Santos-Dumont company wasted no time, flew passengers the day they got their first plane, bucket seats and all.

The fact that the Johnny-come-latelys got the same equipment annoyed the big lines only for a while. Last week, Panair do Brasil, Pan American's local subsidiary and the first non-U.S. company to get a Constellation, flew one from Rio to Casablanca to scout a route to London and Paris for the first Brazilian overseas airline. But Panair President Paulo Sampaio had only a brief headstart on Cruzeiro, whose DC-4s will be flying the Atlantic before summer.

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