All Roads Lead To Rio (when flying to Sao Paulo)

Background: Brazil has been on my mind the past couple weeks since I've recently received Christmas greetings from my Brazilian friends and host family members. This was my last regular weekly newspaper column, published August 1, 2007....not including letters to the editor and guest columns that have since been printed in the Roseburg News-Review. A new airport at Sao Paulo has since been built, alleviating the hazards that are mentioned in this column.

     Some would say there's no destination more beautiful than flying into Rio de Janeiro, where Sugar Loaf Mountain (Pao de Acucar) and the Jesus Christ statue high atop Corcovado, overlook the lazy lagoons along the lush, tropical shoreline. It may almost make up for the inconvenience most travelers encounter, because Rio serves as a connecting airport for other cities in south Brazil.
     A TAM airlines plane crash two weeks ago at Sao Paulo, Brazil, had a personal impact on me. It will be 24 years ago next week, that I was on board a small commuter jet with dozens of other Rotary foreign exchange students, landing at Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo.
     I never did forget the name Congonhas. Although I didn't understand everything I heard in Portuguese during the ten months I lived in Brazil, I did pick up on the fact that Sao Paulo had a small airport.
     It was so small that, back in the early 1980s, all international flights either arrived at Galeao airport in Rio de Janeiro, a seven-hour drive to the north, or at Viracopos airport in Campinas, a Portland-sized city about an hour inland from Sao Paulo. But I thought the problem had been solved long ago; the conversations I heard back in 1983-84 led me to believe that a new airport capable of handling larger jets was in the planning stages for Sao Paulo.
     That's why the crash of an airbus jet that killed all 186 people on board, and several more on the ground, shocked me last month. The airplane reportedly skidded off the short runway at Congonhas, crossed a busy thoroughfare, and crashed into a fuel depot, bursting into flames.
     When I arrived at Congonhas in 1983, Sao Paulo was one of the three largest cities in the world: equal in size to New York City, and smaller only to Tokyo, Japan.  I never could understand why I had to spend more than eight hours on a 747 from Miami to Rio, only to be herded across the runway in Rio into a much smaller jet for the final 50-minute flight to Sao Paulo. That would be like riding a jumbo jet from London to Buffalo, New York, and then catching a commuter flight from Buffalo to New York City.
     Not only did Rio have half the population of Sao Paulo, but what made the situation even more ironic was the topography of the two cities. Sao Paulo was sprawled out for miles in the desert, on an inland plateau, while Rio was hunched against the mountainous shoreline of a tropical rain forest. Yet Rio had two airports, Galeao for international flights and Santos Dumont for domestic flights, and Sao Paulo had to make do with Congonhas.
     Today, the length of the runway at Sao Paulo is even shorter than New York's LaGuardia airport, 6,362 feet compared with 7,033 feet. Before the fatal TAM airlines crash, two airplanes had slipped off the runway during rainy weather just one day earlier.
     Some pilots jokingly refer to Congonhas as the "aircraft carrier," because it's so short and surrounded by residential neighborhoods, that pilots are ordered to take off and try to land again if they overshoot the first thousand feet of runway.
     I'm sure glad that I didn't know these facts when I landed at Congonhas in 1983! The President of Brazil has now promised the location of a new airport in Sao Paulo will be decided within the next 90 days. I'd call that fast action, considering I was led to believe 24 years ago that the government was already in the process of building a new airport.
     Unfortunately, the mayor of Sao Paulo says a new airport would take five-ten years to build and he would instead prefer using eminent domain on nearly landowners, in order to lengthen the existing runway at Congonhas.
     I'm still hoping that one day I will be blessed, so that I can return to visit my friends in Brazil. But even if I should stumble into a sudden windfall of money, I'm not sure that I will fly into Congonhas!