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
Vickers V-1000 on the overall project. Construction of the prototype was performed at Vickers' facility at Wisley Airfield, Surrey; flight trials would have also been based there. By November 1956, over £4 million had been spent on the V-1000 project; the first prototype had also reached 80 per cent completion. It had been estimated that the VC7 would have been in operational service as early as 1959, the same year in which the first V-1000s were projected to be delivered to the RAF. If it had entered commercial service as envisioned, it would have been the first turbofan-equipped airliner to serve long-haul