If the world had not gone in to "recession" at the end of 07/start of 08, there is a good chance I would have been living in a Rio surburb and could have done some really good spoiling. Be that as it may, the strange flight arrangements from Rio to Miami really had me stumped. So I just decided to do the holidays and stop thinking about it for a month.
Normally, American has one direct flight from Rio to Miami, AA904. I dont know how many times I have flown on that flight in the last 12 years....at least 2 times a year. From Dec 1 till about March 1...American adds a second flight from Rio to Miami, AA990. I thought that with the two flights, it would be plenty for TAR to get all the people back to Miami. But AA990 does not fly on Sundays. But both flights arrive in Miami BEFORE sunrise. They are almost always earlier than scheduled time. 904@ 430 am and 990@ 515 am.
American has 3 nightly flights from Sao Paulo to Miami. They leave Sao Paulo later then the flights from Rio to Miami and 2 of them, AA998 @ 630 am and AA930@ 730 am arrive when there is light in the sky. I think this is important for filming of a TV show outdoors. On Dec 13, twilight in Miami was at 630 am and sunrise was at 658 am. It would make sense to me to make the short jog over to Sao Paulo Guarulhos Airport to let the teams arrive in conditions good for filming a TV production., especially the finale. So I would think that BVM had the teams on AA930. He could have put lots of the crew on AA998 arriving earlier, so they could clear customs and be ready to film or they could all have been on the last flight. It seems that possibly that "pilot illness" for AA998 really messed up Americans schedule for that night. How that affected TAR, well I guess we will find out at TARcon in May if anyone asks.
Getting from Rio to SP is pretty simple. There are hourly flights from the downtown Rio airport, Santos Dumont(SDU) to Guarulhos and flights about every 15 mintues from Galeao-Jobim (GIG) to Guarulhos. The flights are all about an hour in length.
Brazil has really good long distance bus service, Production could have chartered one or two of these to get people from Rio to Guarulhos. They have stewardesses and movies on them. The trip is about 4.3 hours from Rio to Guarulhos.
So the fact that AA930 was delayed for about 2 hours just gave production more/better light for filming in my opinion.