Brazil: Too Many Wings

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Ten in Ten. Under Castello Branco's order, Panair's domestic service will go to Cruzeiro do Sul and VASP, which fly to most of the same cities anyway. The real prize, Panair's routes to Europe and the Mideast, will go to Varig, which is already South America's biggest airline and by far its best. Founded in 1927, Varig has been run for the past 23 years by Ruben Berta, 57, a onetime Lufthansa accountant who has built it into an international operation with routes to South America's west coast and the U.S., a huge domestic system, and a fleet of 95 planes, including 15 jets and propjets.

No sooner was Panair grounded than Varig moved in to pick up the pieces, loaded passengers booked on a Panair DC-8 directly onto a Varig Convair 990 for a Lisbon-Paris-Frankfurt flight. Now Berta is talking about renting two of Panair's DC-8s and assigning a new Varig Boeing 707 to the transatlantic service. It was a familiar routine for Berta & Co. Panair is the tenth Brazilian airline that Varig has swallowed in as many years.