The Brazilian sun beats down as I step out of the air-conditioned lounge at Helipark, a heliport on the outskirts of São Paulo, and stride across the tarmac to board the Robinson 44 helicopter owned by Fábio Marangoni.

Marangoni, 42, is one of three brothers who run Gráfica Aquarela, their family-owned high-tech printing business. I am spending the afternoon with him and two helicopter pilots, Comandante Clarissa Pinheiro, who works for him, and Comandante Marcelo Cobra, flying over the city and visiting his beach house at Iporanga, a secluded bay on Guarujá island, about 100km south-east of São Paulo.

São Paulo, the business centre of one of the world’s fastest growing economies and home to almost 20m people, has much to celebrate – but it is a horrendous place in which to move around by car. My drive from the FT’s office near Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s major thoroughfares in the heart of the city, to our take-off point in Carapicuíba, in the west, is fairly typical. Google Maps says the 24km journey should take 33 minutes; it took me an hour and a half.

Traffic congestion has worsened dramatically in recent years and shows no sign of improvement. Some 330,000 new vehicles hit the city’s roads last year, increasing the number of vehicles in circulation to an estimated 6m. Every day, another 635 cars and 235 motorcycles join the brutal crush.

The city’s transport authority, the CET, releases real-time assessments on the amount of stationary traffic blocking up the streets. The amount of congestion in the city has been rising steadily. The average for the evening rush hour was 114km in 2006 and 126km in 2007. On one morning earlier this month, the CET recorded 155km of traffic jams; by that evening, the number had surpassed 200km.

One reason for these worsening traffic conditions is the booming Brazilian economy. In recent years, the country’s domestic market has taken over from the export sector as the key driver of economic growth. More jobs, higher wages and cheaper and more easily available credit have produced a consumption boom that has encouraged a flood of both foreign and local investment in manufacturing and services.

“The biggest factor driving our business is that Brazil itself is growing,” says Jorge Bitar Neto, owner of Helimarte, one of the leading helicopter hire firms in the city. “A lot of people are coming here to do business and that means there will be still more growth.”

Helimarte supplies aircraft for tourist flights and transporting public officials – including the mayor of São Paulo city and the governor of São Paulo state – on an almost daily basis. But most of its customers are visiting business people.

“They are usually completely taken aback,” Bitar says. “A lot of people who come here for the first time don’t realise just how big São Paulo is. They are surprised to be taken around the city so easily, and even more surprised to see what an enormous market is laid out below them.”

The number of helicopters in the country has grown steadily from 749 in 1998 to 1,089 at the end of last year. Of these, about 470 are in São Paulo, making the city home to the world’s third biggest privately-owned fleet, after New York and Tokyo respectively. The city’s fleet is expected to increase even further to about 550 by 2010, according to Cenipa, the air force body responsible for the country’s flight safety. While New York and Tokyo may have more helicopters, most of them are owned by service providers and big corporations. By contrast, in São Paulo, helicopters tend to be owned by individuals.

It probably would be possible to conduct an interview while flying in a Robinson 44, but the noise and the awkward voice-activated microphones deter all but the most flippant or essential communication. Perhaps it is for the best as the view flying over this teeming megalopolis is difficult to ignore – though Marangoni seems most interested in his iPhone. So, it is only later that he explains the difference that helicopters make to his business and his life.

“During the summer holidays,” he explains, “my wife and children spend more than a month down at the beach. It’s only a short drive for them, about an hour. But if I left my office at 6:30pm on a Friday evening by car I wouldn’t get there before 9:30pm at the earliest. With the helicopter, I’m in the pool with the children by 7pm. It’s another evening with the family, another dinner, and I’ve put in a full day’s work.”

Gráfica Aquarela was founded by Marangoni’s grandfather, who passed it on to his son, who has passed it on to Fábio and his three brothers (Fábio is commercial director, while his brothers take care of the financial and industrial sides). Marangoni’s father learned to fly and first owned a small aircraft in 1980. The family bought its first helicopter in 1993. “At first, we used to fly just for fun,” Marangoni explains. “But then we moved the printing works out here from the centre of town and we began to use helicopters to visit suppliers and customers and bring them to the factory.”

From Marangoni’s printing plant, it is a short flight to Avenida Paulista – the journey that took me 90 minutes by car earlier in the day, takes just seven minutes flying over the ubiquitous tower blocks that spread out for mile upon mile. From the air, the canopy of the city looks like a patchwork of brightly coloured helipads: there are about 300 in the city, including some 80 along Avenida Paulista alone, and almost all are in daily use.

After our flight to Avenida Paulista, we head to the coast. We fly over the old centre of town and the sprawling outskirts of greater São Paulo before reaching the lush coastal mountains, where we descend over spectacular green hillsides covered with Atlantic forest down to the beach.

Flávio Andrade, 49, is another helicopter owner who began flying for fun but now uses his aircraft as much for business as pleasure. Like Marangoni, he too owns a printing works, Alphacolor, which makes adhesive labels, and a Robinson 44. Although the helicopter is slower and less comfortable than its bigger, turbo-driven rivals, he says it is “the champion in terms of cost-benefit”.

He bought it new two years ago for about $650,000 together with two friends who are also pilots and who also use the aircraft for both business and pleasure. Collectively, they fly about 20 hours a month. They share the costs between them – hangar, maintenance, fuel, their pilot’s salary, depreciation and so on – and each pays according to the amount of hours he has flown each month.

The cost per flying hour is about R$600 ($350) Andrade explains, or R$800 ($470) an hour including depreciation. That compares with about R$1,400 ($825) an hour to hire a Robinson 44 in São Paulo. In the rest of the country, where competition among rental companies is less fierce, the price per hour for the same aircraft can be as much as R$2,000 ($1,200).

“It makes much more sense to own your own helicopter,” Andrade says. “You are always flying in an aircraft that you have confidence in. You know and trust your mechanics and your pilot. And there is the big advantage for us that you are free to fly it yourself, which you certainly can’t do with a hired helicopter.”

On the day I spoke to Andrade, he had just returned from leaving a customer at Campo de Marte, a small airport next to an exhibition centre in one of the most congested parts of São Paulo. “It is very quick and convenient and it really helps building good relationships with your customers,” he says. “You can offer them a very attractive benefit at a very low cost.”

A typical journey for him involves picking up a regular customer from Aracanduva, in the sprawling eastern region of the city. “We land on top of the shopping centre,” Andrade explains. “From here to there is ten minutes. By car – if all goes well – it takes two hours. You can be in two or three distant places in one day in almost no time at all.”

Beyond the convenience, another issue is security. Muggings and carjackings are increasingly common in São Paulo. Anyone choosing to get about in a luxury car that stands out from the predominantly middle-market vehicles in the city is easy to spot. Using bullet-proof cars and armed escorts is an option, but they still leave you stuck in traffic.

Moreover, helicopters score much better in terms of accident safety than cars. Last year, 12 people died in helicopter accidents in all of Brazil, in line with the average over the past ten years. In São Paulo alone, in 2006 (the last year for which figures are available) 1,520 people died in traffic accidents, half of them after being hit by vehicles. There were about 700 incidents (accidents, breakdowns, flat tires and so on) every day.

In 2004, São Paulo introduced a helicopter monitoring system that extends beyond the environs of the city’s downtown airport at Congonhas. This included the central part of the city where most flights take place and which is crossed by airliners and other aircraft on their way in and out of Congonhas, Brazil’s busiest airport in terms of aircraft movement.

The continued growth of the fleet led Cenipa to produce a list of 49 recommendations last month,

including the use of the TCAS traffic alert and collision avoidance system on helicopters and the extension of traffic control systems for helicopters to other towns in the greater São Paulo area.

Yet Helimarte’s Bitar, for one, sees no impediment to expansion of the fleet. “São Paulo is the number one city in the world for helicopter transport because we are the only city with a proper control system,” he says. “This gives us total security. There is still a lot of room for growth with no threat to safety.”

However, it is the sheer difficulty of getting around São Paulo that does most to encourage people to travel by helicopter. Indeed, the only threat to expansion of the helicopter fleet seems to be the growing popularity of fixed-wing aircraft. There are plenty of small airfields on the outskirts of São Paulo that make use of a small aeroplane almost as convenient as using a helicopter.

“Look at the pharmaceuticals industry,” says Andrade. “All the owners of pharmaceuticals companies have their own jets.”

Among those thinking of investing in the winged option is Fábio Marangoni. As we sit at his beach house and chat about the flight from the city – and agree that it certainly beats being stuck in a car for hours – Marangoni reveals his plans for the future. “We fly a lot to my wife’s family in Araras up in the interior of the state,” he says. “It takes 50 or 60 minutes by helicopter. We did a test in a small plane the other day – it took 15 minutes.” And he smiles broadly, like a boy with a new toy.