Sabena airliners which were augmented and later replaced by Douglas DC-6Bs. The DC-4s also restarted the airline's traditional route to the Belgian Congo. Sabena was the first airline to introduce transatlantic schedules from the north of England, when one of its DC-6Bs inaugurated the Brussels-Manchester-New York route on 28 October 1953. The Convair 240 was introduced in 1949 to partially replace the DC-3s that until then had flown most European services. As of 1956, improved Convair 440 "Metropolitan" twins began replacing the Convair 240 twins and were used successfully well into the 1960s between European regional destinations. In 1957, the long-range
Iberia (airline) airline with a flight Madrid-Lisbon. In 1940 the government gave the monopoly of national air transport to Iberia (this fact changed 6 years later when the government liberalizate the national air traffic for the private airlines), this privilege helped the company to start building as an important international airline, which had not been until then. The airline was nationalised on 30 September 1944 and became part of Instituto Nacional de Industria. The policy of the company was to separate itself from the German orbit to which it had been linked in its first years, and establish relations with the United