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
British Aircraft Corporation operational today as Bristol Cars. Most of the BAC designs were taken over from the individual companies that formed it. BAC did not apply its new identity retrospectively, hence the VC10 remained the Vickers VC10. Instead the company applied its name to marketing initiatives, the VC10 advertising carried the name "Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) Limited, a member company of the British Aircraft Corporation". The first model to bear the BAC name was the BAC One-Eleven (BAC 1–11), a Hunting Aircraft study, in 1961. Bristol had eschewed the subsonic airliner market and was working on the Bristol 223 supersonic transport, which was eventually