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 Viscount TAA. Unstated was the requirement for both airlines to have identical equipment. The first North American airline to use turboprop aircraft was Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), with a small fleet of Type 700 Viscounts. Initially, TCA was cautious of the Viscount due to the turboprop engine being a new technology, and there had been a preference for acquiring the piston-engined Convair CV-240 instead; praise of the Viscount from pilots and a promise from Vickers to make any design changes desired by TCA persuaded it to procure the Viscount instead. On 6 December 1954, the first Viscount was delivered to Canada