The new Varig plan to cancel all domestic and international flights with the exception of the São Paulo-Rio shuttle service didn’t fly. It lasted just a few hours.
ANAC, the Brazilian aviation authority, vetoed the idea and ordered the company to go back into the skies to all the routes they were serving just before being sold in an auction on Thursday, July 20, to VarigLog.
That means that Varig should start flying immediately to New York, Miami, London, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Lima, Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Santiago, Caracas, and Aruba
And domestically the flight to be resumed were to Belém, Brasília, Curitiba, Fernando de Noronha, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Foz do Iguaçu, Macapá, Manaus, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife and Salvador.
Milton Zuanazzi, president of the ANAC, warned that Varig could lose the concession of the routes to the competition if the company stopped serving them even for a few days as they planned to do.
VarigLog announced that all flights had been cancelled until July 28, and that the old routes would be resumed only gradually.
Zuanazzi also informed that since 2 pm, this Friday, July 26, Varig was again flying to five international destinations and five national ones with a total of eight airplanes.
According to him, people with Varig tickets should go to the Varig counter in the airport and demand that they get a seat in a Varig plane or in another company.
Passengers are also advised to keep receipts of hotels, restaurants and trasportation for the time they are prevented from flying so that they can charge Varig later.
The ANAC’s decison, however, instead of calming passengers and normalizing the situation brought more chaos to the aiports and more heartaches to those passengers holding Varig tickets.
In Cumbica, the international airport of São Paulo, for example, the Varig store was closed and employees at the company’s counter had not been informed that the arline had been ordered to resume its flights.
The situation was worse for those passengers with tickets to Mexico, Peru and Chile. There are no other Brazilian companies flying these routes and the international airlines serving those cities were refusing to endorse Varig tickets.
