Aeropostal Alas de Venezuela Colombian airline, LANSA. Until TACA de Venezuela was completely absorbed by LAV in 1958, the route to Bogotá was flown using TACA aircraft in TACA livery. During the 1950s, LAV opened a transatlantic service and began flying to Panama (in 1953). The Constellation fleet was upgraded to L-1049G Super Constellations. An order for the first jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet 1, was placed, but with the Comet crashes of the 1950s, the airline never got their Comet jets. On 24 March 1956, LAV introduced its first turboprop, a Vickers Viscount 701 which was to replace the older piston engined
Turboprop a turboshaft. Alan Arnold Griffith had published a paper on turbine design in 1926. Subsequent work at the Royal Aircraft Establishment investigated axial turbine designs that could be used to supply power to a shaft and thence a propeller. From 1929, Frank Whittle began work on centrifugal turbine designs that would deliver pure jet thrust. The world's first turboprop was designed by the Hungarian mechanical engineer György Jendrassik. Jendrassik published a turboprop idea in 1928, and on 12 March 1929 he patented his invention. In 1938, he built a small-scale (100 Hp; 74.6 kW) experimental gas turbine. The larger Jendrassik