SNETA 7 of SNETA's 23 airplanes. By 1 June 1922, enough information was gathered and all experimental flights were suspended. This cleared the way to start up a real Belgian commercial operator, SABENA, which came into being on 23 May 1923 and into which SNETA merged. SNETA The Syndicat national d'Etude des Transports Aériens ("National Union of Study of Aerial Transport"), known by its acronym SNETA, was a Belgian airline which operated from 1919 to 1923 in order to pioneer commercial aviation in Belgium. In 1923 it ceased operations and merged into the newly founded national carrier SABENA. The company was
Sabena from Seaboard World Airlines, using them mainly on transatlantic routes. In the same period, there were experiments with helicopter passenger service using Sikorsky S-58 aircraft from Brussels to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and the Paris heliport at Issy-les-Moulineaux. 1960 saw the introduction of the Boeing 707-320 intercontinental jet for trans-Atlantic flights to New York. SABENA was mainland Europe's first airline to operate a jet across the Atlantic (BOAC had been flying jet transatlantic services using the de Havilland Comet 4 since 4 October 1958). One of Sabena's aircraft became the first Boeing 707 to crash while in commercial service when Flight