Rodolphe Marchais leasing and aircraft maintenance activities, through its subsidiaries, TAT leasing and Sabena technics. In a decade, TAT Group increased its maintenance activity and took part in a concentration movement in a fragmented market: it acquired successively AOM Industries in 2000, Sabena technics (at the time maintenance subsidiary of the Belgian National Airline) in 2005 and EADS Sogerma Services as well as EADS Barfield in 2007, making his subsidiary, Sabena technics, the world’s third largest independent MRO. Today, Sabena technics has all the necessary skills and agreements to perform maintenance on a large range of narrow and wide-body aircraft (Airbus, Boeing,
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