A book fell into my hands which, although it is an academic research, sounded both nostalgic and melancholic to me: “Hosts of Heaven: Career, Crisis and Disillusionment on Board of Varig” (Telha editor), a doctoral thesis by the anthropologist argentina based in Rio de Janeiro Carolina Castellitti focused on flight attendants.
It is a text for scholars; but those who are not, like me, can navigate it without turmoil, immersing themselves in the history of commercial aviation in Brazil from the perspective of the professionals who were the embodied representation of the image of airlines.
They used to be called stewardesses. Or, I learned in the book, they were flight attendants first—initially women didn’t do the job.
Through interviews with former professionals, with the extinct airline Varig as a field of study, Castellitti traces the journey with an adventurous and courageous beginning of women who defied conventions towards financial and family independence, and ends with the slow agony of the company that by years was also a portrait of Brazil to the world.
Varig was what they call a flagship airline, one of those that, whether state-owned or not (Varig was not), are recognized in the world as the national company of a country. In 2005 she went into judicial recovery, already broken; but before that, at least until the dawn of the year 2000, it provided voyages in which the turmoil that at the top of the company undermined its management did not spill over.
I lived through the time when Varig’s headquarters in Paris, on the ground floor of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, was a veritable embassy of the country in France. It had a lobby/living room, where fellow countrymen from the pre-internet era used to go to read Brazilian newspapers and meet people who spoke the same language.
This quasi-embassy spread around the world also worked in other types of diplomatic action: getting tickets for a Brazilian team to represent the country, or to bring some celebrity that Brazil was interested in having on our soil, this to give two of infinite examples (among them , take ingredients to culinary festivals, or Brazilian products to fairs, and so on).
Not forgetting that, with or without tickets, travelers found an in-flight service worth noting, from Scotch whiskey on national routes to champagne and caviar in first class on international flights (which celebrities had access to with copious upgrades).
At the time of Varig’s crisis, this caviar became the scapegoat to explain the company’s financial collapse. Excessive generosity was pointed out in the on-board service, and in the invitations and courtesies of tickets.
I’m not sure that these treats were responsible: the luxuries in on-board services were characteristic of the large flag airlines of other countries as well, with which Varig disputed international space.
Several of them were also on the verge of bankruptcy, were bought or incorporated into others to survive, and I don’t know if their crises were caused by caviar —​​and even today, luxury on board continues to be a differential for several of them, not to mention those Asia and especially the Middle East.
One thing is certain: whatever the culprit, it wasn’t the flight attendants, crew or ground crews that caused Varig to go astray.
However, as Castellitti’s book shows, the main victims of these mistakes were these workers —among them, the flight attendants who embodied the glamor that Varig represented in the air for so long.
