9/19/1946: TAP Flies Its First Commercial Service, Lisbon to Madrid

LISBON — Today, in 1946, a Douglas DC-3 Dakota registered CS-TDF lifted off from Lisbon bound for Madrid with 11 passengers aboard, opening the first commercial line of the airline now known as TAP Air Portugal (TP). Correio da Manhã puts the flight time at 1hr 50mins.

The company flying it was not yet a company. TAP had been created 18 months earlier, on March 14, 1945, by Order of Service No. 7 of the Secretariado da Aeronáutica Civil, which established a Secção de Transportes Aéreos: an air transport section inside a government department. The order carried the signature of Humberto Delgado, and TAP still names him as its founder. The department bought two DC-3 Dakotas that same year and spent the following months preparing to fly them.

The Imperial Line

Three months after Madrid, on December 31, 1946, TAP opened the Linha Aérea Imperial between Lisbon, Luanda and Lourenço Marques, the city now called Maputo. It was a 12-stop route taking 15 days to fly out and back, and Kiosque da Aviação describes it as the longest in the world then operated by twin-engine aircraft. Dinheiro Vivo put the round trip at 24,540km (about 15,250 miles). Luanda and Lourenço Marques were then the capitals of Portugal's colonies of Angola and Mozambique.

João Graça had joined TAP in September 1946 as one of the first eight pilots it trained. Interviewed by Dinheiro Vivo in 2015 at the age of 94, by then the last survivor of the group, he remembered the inauguration of both routes and flew his own first Madrid service in April 1947, alongside Commander Roger Avelar. He logged more than 7,000 hours on the DC-3.

The network filled in quickly from there. Lisbon–Porto opened as the first domestic route in 1947, the year TAP bought Douglas C-54 Skymasters. The airline became a full IATA member in 1948 and added Paris and Seville, London in 1949, and Casablanca and Tangier in 1953. In 1953 it was also converted from a state service into a SARL, a limited company, with the state as majority shareholder. TAP was nationalized in 1975 and privatized in 2015, and the state is its majority shareholder again today.

Eighty Years On

TAP celebrated 80 years since its founding in March 2025. Its anniversary announcement reported more than 16 million passengers carried in 2024 and a fleet of 99 aircraft, with 84 cities and more than 1,250 weekly flights scheduled for that summer. Chief Executive Luís Rodrigues said the airline had grown "from a small carrier, with two aircraft," in words translated from the Portuguese.

This anniversary, of the first flight, arrives in the middle of a sale. Air France-KLM and Lufthansa submitted binding offers for a minority stake on July 29, 2026, and the Portuguese state holding company Parpública handed its report on the two bids to the government on September 1. The government then opened negotiations with both groups, saying their overall valuations were very close and that it wanted improved proposals before choosing a single bidder for the final round. It now expects to name the winner in mid-October, according to ECO. The sale is structured to leave 44.9% with a reference investor, up to 5% with employees and 50.1% with the state.

Among other commitments, the government has asked bidders to address growth at Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS), TAP's Lisbon hub. It is named after the man whose order created the airline in 1945.