Equipo Williams

During one of my many falls down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, I was reading about Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont.  He is a national hero in Brazil: if you’re within a kilometer of an airport you will find something named after him.  Many Brazilians also make the claim that he should be considered the first to fly an airplane, a claim that seems to have a lot to do with the fact that the Wright brothers used a rail to take off and Santos-Dumont took off using what we would consider landing gear and Santos-Dumont did his first flight in front of a crowd.  Kind of a dubious claim, and the Wrights were flying for kilometers when Santos-Dumont was hopping off the ground for a hundred meters.  Had it not been for the Wrights, someone else would have flown first and it may well have been Santos-Dumont. 

ANYWAY!  The Wikipedia rabbit-hole led to this interesting piece of information: 

Physician Walther Haberfield secretly removed his heart during the embalming process and preserved it in formaldehyde.  After keeping this a secret for twelve years, he wanted to return it to the Santos-Dumont family, who refused it. The doctor then donated the heart to the Brazilian government after a request from Panair do Brasil. The heart is on display at the Air Force Museum in Campo dos Afonsos, Rio de Janeiro, inside a sphere carried by Icarus, designed by Paulo da Rocha Gomide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont

What?!  A sculpture containing the stolen heart of an aviation pioneer, AND in an airplane museum AND it’s basically just down the road?  Who can say no to that?

Our first day in Rio was cloudy and rainy, so no good for Sugarloaf or Corcovado peaks and no good for the beach.  But the Air Force Museum was open!  We piled into an Uber for the 45-minute drive through Rio to the gates of Afonsos Air Force Base.  We signed in with the soldiers at the gatehouse and then walked past a C-130 and an F-5 to the museum.   The museum was hosting an airshow the following week, so I think many of the aircraft that are normally on the flight line had been moved.

The lower floor of the museum was several hangers of aircraft important to Brazil.  Favorites included a de Havilland Tiger Moth, a Grumman tracker, and of course a replica of the 14-bis.

There was a small second floor with various displays about the history of the Brazilian Air Force and Brazilian aviation in general, and then, in a corner, was Icarus holding his globe.

And then the mystery deepened.  Both the plaque on the sculpture and the sign next to it said that the sculpture held the heart not of Alberto Santos-Dumont, but of Eduardo Gomes, an Air Marshal and political figure also important in Brazilian aviation. 

This is weird.  I haven’t been able to find any documentation stating that Gomes’s heart is in the globe apart from the website of the museum, but many articles attest to it being Santos-Dumont’s heart.  In addition, the statue has been around since the 1940s, but Gomes died in 1981.  The Museum seems to be the only place that says that the heart is Gomes’s, although in one location it looks like the globe may contain BOTH hearts.  Weird.

I didn’t ask at the time (a. weird thing to ask a docent, b. I don’t speak Portugeuse, and c. I was getting the “can we leave yet” from the family), so I’m left with a mystery.  My vote is that it contains not one but two hearts, both Santos-Dumont’s and Gomes’s, and that the museum is trying to play down the weirdness of how Santos-Dumont’s heart ended up there.  I’d also probably be pretty coy about having a human heart if I knew it had been initially stolen.