In the late 1950s, Brazil's Varig Airlines was competing successfully with Pan American on the Rio de Janeiro (RIO)-to-New York route—in spite of Varig's new Lockheed "Super-Constellation G" and its complicated, unreliable, turbo-compound engines. We departed RIO on Aug. 16, 1957, bound for Belem, then Santo Domingo (it was called Ciudad Trujillo at the time) and, ultimately, New York City. Flight 850 droned over the Brazilian jungle, on schedule and uneventful, aimed at the weak Belem automatic direction finding (ADF) beacon. To ensure the rudimentary navigation aid was available to its crews, the company had to pay a local radio-broadcast station to stay on the air through the night, giving us a signal to home on.
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