Roland Barthes cited the movie repeatedly in a 1964 interview on semiology and cinema, and Steven Spielberg reportedly wrote to de Broca telling him that he'd seen it nine times.[NYTimes 2015]
Unofficially, this movie was heavily influenced by the Belgian cartoonist, Hergé and the Tintin adventures which he authored. Many specific plot points can be traced directly to specific Tintin books, and the general pacing of the story and certain visuals are all clearly inspired by Hergé's work.
4th highest-grossing movie of the year in France.
The plane used for the movie was indeed a plane of the then-existent "Pan Air do Brasil". Registration was PP-PDS. This plane was flown later on by a freight airline and is now written off. It remains more or less wrecked at Iquitos, Peru.
(at about 1h) The building shown prominently in the area under development is the National Congress Palace (Palácio do Congresso Nacional). The building opened in April of 1960, the same year that Brazil's capitol moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia. It has two semi-spheres, one for the Senate and the other for the Chamber of Deputies, and two office towers. The entire complex of government buildings took several years to build, and was under construction at the time this was movie was being filmed.