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runwayrunway · 9 months

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No. 29 - What is the Flag Carrier of Brazil?

In part two of what is at this point going to be a three-part post, let's look at some history, which happens to include a bunch of liveries, on a quest to answer the question...well, it's the title.

We've talked a lot about flag carriers on this blog. I believe, quite emphatically, that flag carriers should have particular considerations when designing liveries, which I've discussed in my Icelandair post. After all, these are a point of national pride, at least in theory. This is one of the reasons most countries have them, and I've mentioned the US as a rare exception. The United States have never had an official flag carrier, and this persists to this day.

But what is the flag carrier of Brazil?

I asked this question on my recent questionnaire. I got a lot of answers. This one was my favorite.

But aside from that, the answers I got were all over the place, and only one of them was correct (while a handful of people did know the correct answer for Switzerland). In fact, the majority weren't real airlines, and none were airlines that currently exist. In order, the most common responses were:

An explicit admission of not knowing

Some variant of "Brazil Air" or "Brazilian Airlines" (not real, has never been real, at least not as anything except a lengthened official name to an airline which goes by something else, i.e. Azul)

Things that are just totally silly, like Green

Airlines that were real, but no longer operate, specifically one guess of TAM and one of VARIG, the latter of which was acknowledged by the submitter as being defunct

Embraer, which as far as I can tell does sort of fit the same spot for Brazil as Boeing does for the US

Rainforest Airlines (not real)

"Something Portuguese", which was a fair bet and I wish was true (you would have been right if you'd gone for the reliable Latin American answer 'an abbreviation', though)

The correct answer, from an actual Brazilian: is this a trick question?

Yeah, Brazil...doesn't really have a flag carrier, not in a way that matters. But 'what is the flag carrier of Brazil' has been an interesting question for a while now. So it doesn't have a flag carrier - what does it have? To answer that question, I first have to answer another one. It hasn't always been this way. So...where did Brazil's flag carrier go?

Founded just a month after Pan Am and slightly before Iberia, VARIG (Viação Aérea Rio-Grandense, Rio Grande Airlines) was Brazil's first airline, its largest, and its main bridge to the rest of the world. In short, its flag carrier.

Well, technically, VASP existed too. I feel like people forget about VASP. Viação Aérea São Paulo (São Paulo Airlines), known better as VASP, was founded in 1933 by the state of São Paulo.

They flew this awesome-looking plane, the General Aircraft Monospar.

Since São Paulo is nowhere near the ocean, they used only landplanes, which was pretty unusual for the time. Early on this meant they were using dirt airstrips and 'airstrips', presumably just some grass that had airplanes landed on it until it got all smushed down. Eventually an airport was built to accommodate them, though.

São Paulo–Congonhas Airport (CGH/SBSP) is Brazil's second-busiest airport. It is known for its gorgeous terminal building and being one of the most dangerous airports in the world due to crowding and runways which become unnervingly slippery with even the slightest rain, which contributed directly to it being the site of Brazil's deadliest air disaster. It now has a very low cap on operations and no longer serves international destinations, but that might be VASP's single biggest contribution to history - an airport that caused a mass casualty event after VASP had already stopped flying. In its defense, landing at Congonhas was still probably nominally safer than putting a 737 down in an empty field, and tore up the landing gear less.

VASP was pretty dominant domestically for most of its history (while VARIG was essentially the only international airline), until it entered an incredible death spiral. The decline began in the 80s, in a way I would not describe as an incredible death spiral. That portion was initiated when VASP was privatized, attempted to expand into international destinations, gave up on that within a decade, stopped flying altogether and existed only to provide maintenance for other airlines, and then went bankrupt in 2008.

I prefer its livery to VARIG's, I think. I like that they didn't promptly shift the wordmark all the way forward like a lot of airlines did, and I like their shade of blue, but I sort of miss the old blue stripes. I mean, jetBlue could try that on for a tail? Still, always quite simple. It has one or two things I'd call 'features' in every iteration, but it never goes above a C- for me.

So, yeah. I would feel like I was omitting something if I didn't at least mention it, given it was a nationalized carrier and a huge chunk of Brazilian aviation history. I just feel like everyone forgot VASP the moment they went out of business, and that almost makes me sad.

Oh, well! There's other airlines.

Like VARIG! I feel like VARIG's older tramline blue livery was somehow pretty iconic despite being deeply, deeply generic. It does the layered, multicolor cheatline thing Lufthansa did but with blue-on-blue, which I actually quite like, and indeed this does feel a bit like a monocolor Lufthansa of the time period. I'm unsure if I actually think it's iconic because I'd be able to pick its old livery out of an identity parade or just because it was massive, but I'm going to just give it a C, I think, which would probably be higher if I were alive in the time period, but I don't believe I was. Let me know if you know anything I don't on the subject.

Their modern livery (designed in 1996 by the prolific Landor Associates) was also pretty alright. I like that weird little inexplicable divot, feels like it keeps me on my toes - not an airline I can rely on straight lines with! Nice legible wordmark, gold contrasting symbol (though I think they could have done something on the main body with it), it's all nice, it's all cromulent, C airline. This was designed at a point where full white fuselage wasn't done to death the way it is now, or I'd be harsher, but it feels a bit like beating up a corpse, given the rest of this post.

VARIG was Brazil's only real international airline for literal decades. It existed until 2005, other airlines gradually cropping up to chip away at its monopoly, until it finally went under and was restructured into two companies. One, the judicial successor known colloquially as "old VARIG", became the quickly-defunct FLEX Linhas Aéreas, which lasted all of another five years; the brand, meanwhile, was given to "new VARIG", which was purchased by GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes.

GOL haven't been using the VARIG brand, which I generally think is the better move when it comes to acquiring old trademarks; better to build something new than attempt to resurrect something dead. Besides, they have their own brand, using the unusual color scheme of grey and orange and with a very memorable and simple logo (though it does look a bit like it says GOOL).

Judging by the reactions of a couple Brazilians I know in person who I told about this airline, the name is a love letter to Brazilian culture. Flag carrier material? Well, let's pause. How do they look? Are these planes a country can be proud of?

I like the loops a lot. While I prefer the scribbly feeling of the old GOL wordmark (the first two planes pictured) I think the new livery (immediately above) is an improvement in every other way, namely a somewhat clever solution to the Detached Tail Syndrome problem. I like how the wordmark is centered on the fuselage, and the fact that there are loop details on the winglets as well.

And, honestly, people underrate how hard it is to make a design like this look good consistently from different angles, but I think this does. I like it.

Do I wish there was more orange and grey and less white? Yes, but do I think it uses what little color it is very well and is more than the sum of its parts? Also yes. This could definitely improve a lot but it's very well thought out - just think even more outside the box and you'll get there.

B-. I like this, even though orange is my least favorite color and doesn't feel like it should go with grey at all. Good job, GOL.

Even though new VARIG wasn't the same company, surely it was part of VARIG, so this would make GOL its successor? That does make sense, hypothetically, but isn't how it shook out. For one, GOL is a low-cost carrier, which flag carriers usually aren't, particularly because LCCs tend to fly shorter point-to-point routes. (In 2019 GOL was Brazil's largest domestic airline with nearly 40% of the market share, and its third largest international airline, with nearly...four percent.)

The second, and I think potentially more damaging event, one which kept it in this mostly-domestic state, was a codeshare agreement with Portuguese flag carrier TAP Air Portugal falling through. TAP is a major international airline which flies basically everywhere within A330 range of Lisbon and which I constantly see as a codeshare option on flights to places that are definitely not actually in Portugal. GOL is the sort of airline I'd call...nominally international, in that it does fly to other countries, but those countries aren't particularly distant. They fly to other destinations in South America, a few in the Caribbean, and also Florida. It would be tricky to manage anything else given their all-737 fleet; they seem to have owned and operated 767s for just long enough to realize that this 'being a flag carrier' thing wasn't going to work out for them. TAP? They fly to South Africa, Venezuela, Norway, Guinea, Macau, Montreal - basically everywhere, including eleven destinations in Brazil. GOL flies to 17 countries in total. This was followed up with a failed attempt to join oneworld which also fell through for some reason or another, after which GOL said 'well, that's fine, we didn't want to be part of an alliance anyway' and then just went back to minding their own business domestically and making heaps of money, while the last vestiges of even new VARIG became thoroughly extinct to the point that I didn't know GOL technically had the trademark until maybe a month ago.

TAP did codeshare with a Brazilian carrier, though, one of the other three largest in the country.

If you feel something ominous building up, sense a certain presence...

No. Stop smirking, David. You won't be involved in TAP until 2015. At this point in the David Neeleman timeline he was still at jetBlue. Wait, does this make TAP jetBlue's step-sister?

To be totally honest I think by force of branding alone Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras should get to be the flag carrier because clearly they want it and nobody else does, but they have the same issues GOL does and given David seems to have moved on I can't imagine that changing anytime soon. B+ for the Brazilian flag livery, by the way, that looks awesome.

No, this post is not going to become about David Neeleman, it's going to become about TAM Linhas Aéreas.

TAM originally stood for Táxi Aéreo Marília. The airline was later named TAM – Transportes Aéreos Regionais, and operated a subsidiary called Brasil Central Airlines. When restrictions on destinations for domestic carriers were lifted in the 90s this subsidiary rebranded to Transportes Aéreos Meridionais. You may notice that this means there are two TAMs, owned by the same holding company (only distinguishable by their differing IATA codes, KK and JJ - they even had the same livery).

They solved this issue by just becoming one carrier, TAM Transportes Aéreos (with the code JJ). They tried to buy VASP, didn't manage to buy VASP, and then sort of became the flag carrier anyway.

I hate TAM's livery because I like it but also hate it. They did the Lufthansa straight-tail back when that was a major innovation over Detached Tail Syndrome, I like the way the trim on the tail goes all the way over the top of the rudder and widens as it slopes down, I like the little bird on their wordmark a lot, and I love the red and white with just a hint of blue. This color scheme is just fantastic. My only criticism is that they stopped and forgot to do anything with the rest of the plane.

I mean, like, it looks okay, right? This looks fine?

Hmm, okay, flattering angle, still looks decent-

NO NO NO PUT IT BACK WHITE TUBE WHITE TUBE WHITE TUBE-

This livery looks so phenomenally back-heavy despite the huge wordmark. This is an A321. This isn't even a long-looking plane by any stretch of the imagination. I'm going to say it outright: this is why you paint your engine cowlings.

C, but the concept is good!

There's a lot to work with if you just commit to the bit! Given the timeline we're working with, TAM would actually probably be overhauling their livery sometime around now...you know, if they still existed.

TAM got the codeshare deal with TAP. TAM joined Star Alliance. After VARIG went under and GOL dropped the bag TAM became Brazil's de facto flag carrier. They were full-service, flew to Europe and North America, and they had the Brazilian flag on their planes, which were registered in Brazil. They became the largest airline in Brazil. Then the largest in Latin America.

Average state of Congonhas pre-2015, assumedly back when it was still allowed to land international flights.

They were also rated runner-up for least safe airline in the world by the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre in 2013.

...what a note to go out on, huh?

For a few years now, something has been building, far from the prying eyes of those watching the liveries of the planes taxiing by them. Soon the parasite inside TAM will burst out, and the largest country in South America will no longer have an airline of its own.

Something very big is about to happen. Something which casts a shadow over all of Latin American civil aviation.