As the economy booms, the number of helicopters in this vast city is soaring

With the newsroom clock about to strike 11.30am Natalia Ariede, a 26-year-old reporter from Brazil's biggest TV network, was gearing up for another day's work.

Minutes later she was 2,400 feet over one of the world's largest cities, racing to the scene of a road-traffic accident in her floating office - Globo television's specially adapted four-seater Squirrel helicopter better known as the Globocop.

"Even if something happens on the other side of the city we can be there in 15 minutes," she said as the aircraft swept towards its target across a seemingly endless sea of concrete dotted with swimming pools, helipads, shantytowns and abandoned warehouses.

Within minutes the crash came into view below. At the head of a gigantic traffic jam, rescue workers milled around the site of the accident.

According to Brazil's National Aviation Agency the number of helicopters in Sao Paulo state jumped from 374 to 469 between 1999 and 2008, making it the helicopter capital of the world ahead of both New York and Tokyo. The helicopter boom has transformed Sao Paulo into a real-life, South American episode of The Jetsons, with a constant flow of helicopters jittering through the city's skies, tiny spots ducking and diving as they make their way from helipad to helipad.

In the city of Sao Paulo alone there are 420 helicopters, which can be seen day and night cruising high above its vast concrete horizon. Analysts say another 83 helicopters will join the city's fleet by 2010.

"Sao Paulo is crazy - [there is] crime, traffic and very wealthy people and big companies", said Commander Cleber Mansur, 58, the president of Brazil's helicopter pilot association, who returned to Sao Paulo's aviation boom after years working as a pilot fighting fires in Canada and Chile and transporting oil workers in the Amazon.

"If you put everything in a pan you get a very nice cake. And this cake means: buy lots of helicopters. If you don't do that you don't move in the city."

Brazilians often refer to Rio de Janeiro as the divided city, split between the impoverished hilltop shantytowns and the wealthy apartment blocks below.

But the helicopter craze currently sweeping Sao Paulo is also a tale of two radically different cities.

Above, the space-age world where flying news teams trawl the skies for their next scoop and wealthy executives glide effortlessly between luxury condominiums, beach resorts and business meetings; below, the gridlocked mayhem where the vast majority of residents crush together in an orgy of congestion and motorcycle crashes.

Denis Cupertino, a 24-year-old taxi driver from southern Sao Paulo, said he was saving up for a PlayStation to keep him occupied at the wheel. "When the traffic stops I'll just switch it on and have a game."

Traffic jams often stretch to more than 130 miles in greater Sao Paulo, a sprawling megalopolis accommodating around 20 million people and 6 million cars. Last year more cars were sold here than ever before with nearly 1,000 new vehicles hitting the roads each day.

Faced with increasingly chaotic roads, a growing number of business people, bankers and news organizations such as Globo are taking to the air, alongside an army of around 820 increasingly well-compensated pilots.

Raymundo Barros, Globo's head of engineering and the man responsible for the Globocop, said helicopters were the ideal means of covering traffic problems, prison rebellions and fires - but they were also essential for getting to stories at all. "Without the helicopter we would lose an hour, one and a half hours. In journalism this makes all the difference."

While the helicopter craze was a symptom of Sao Paulo's greatest problem, traffic, it was also symbolic of the city's current economic boom, he added.

The GDP of Sao Paulo state swelled from R$643bn (£204.5bn) to around R$727bn between 2004 and 2005, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

A spectacular R$233m suspension bridge - intended to be Brazil's answer to the Golden Gate and a monument to the city's economic renaissance - was inaugurated last month just over the road from TV Globo's helipad. Sao Paulo's love affair with helicopters began in 1994, following the government's introduction of an economic plan that pegged the new Brazilian currency to the US dollar. The result was a sudden influx of US-made helicopters. By the mid-1990s the US helicopter giant Bell had even introduced pilot training courses in Portuguese, because of the rise in demand from Brazil.

Today, with Brazil enjoying another period of economic stability and its currency recently hitting a nine-year high against the dollar, Sao Paulo's airspace is filling up once again.

It was approaching 12.30pm and Ariede and her technical assistant were scanning the ground below the Globocop for signs of a house that had collapsed. One victim was reportedly trapped under the debris.

"The Globocop is very dynamic," she said. "I'd already written my text about the traffic problems today and now we're being diverted to a collapsed building where someone has apparently been buried."

Minutes later she was hovering above the construction site and relaying her report back to the television HQ. Half a dozen other helicopters could be seen flittering across the drab, cloudy skyline around the Globocop. "In a city like Sao Paulo [helicopters] are no longer a luxury," said Barros. "For many people they now are a necessity."

At a glance

6 million

Cars in Sao Paulo

70,000

Minimum number of helicopter flights within central Sao Paulo each year

11,000

Annual flights and landings at London's main heliport, in Battersea

820

Helicopter pilots work in Sao Paulo; each can earn $100,000 a year

420

Helipads in Sao Paulo - 75% of Brazil's total and 50% more than the whole UK

·SOURCE: ESRC