Rolls-Royce Dart Rolls-Royce Dart The Rolls-Royce RB.53 Dart is a long-lived British turboprop engine designed, built and manufactured by Rolls-Royce Limited. First run in 1946, it powered the first Vickers Viscount maiden flight in 1948, and in the Viscount was the first turboprop engine to enter airline service, with British European Airways (BEA), in 1950. On 29 July 1948 a flight between Northolt and Paris–Le Bourget Airport with 14 paying passengers in a Dart-powered Viscount was the first scheduled airline flight by any turbine-powered aircraft. The Dart was still in production when the last Fokker F27 Friendships and Hawker Siddeley HS 748s
Turboprop in the experimental Consolidated Vultee XP-81. The XP-81 first flew in December 1945, the first aircraft to use a combination of turboprop and turbojet power. The technology of the Allison's earlier T38 design evolved into the Allison T56, with quartets of the T56s being used to power the Lockheed Electra airliner, its military maritime patrol derivative the P-3 Orion, and the widely produced C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft. One of the most produced turboprop engines used in civil aviation is the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 engine. The first turbine-powered, shaft-driven helicopter was the Kaman K-225, a development of Charles