History
The airline was established in 1962 and started operations in 1963 as Líneas Aéreas Paraguayas. After a brief period (1994–1996) as a subsidiary of the Ecuadorian airline SAETA when its name was LAPSA, in 1996 the majority of the stakes of LAP were sold to the Brazilian airline TAM Airlines and the current acronym was adopted. This is not to be confused with a Bolivia military-run passenger service, Transporte Aéreo Militar, TAM, operating mainly DC-3 and CASA 212 aircraft to domestic underserved destinations and not related to the civilian airline.
In 1994 TAM Airlines established a small subsidiary airline in Paraguay, called ARPA - Aerolíneas Paraguayas, with a fleet consisting mostly of Cessna 208 Caravan aircraft, formerly operated by TAM. On 1 September 1996, ARPA purchased 80% of the shares of the former state-owned LAP - Líneas Aéreas Paraguayas and both airlines were merged under the name TAM - Transportes Aéreos del Mercosur. Today TAM owns 94.98% and the Paraguayan government 5.02% of the shares.
In 2008, following a branding strategy, the name TAM Mercosur was dropped and the airline adopted a corporate identity identical to its Brazilian owner, becoming TAM Airlines. However, its corporate structure remains the same.
Read more about this topic: TAM Airlines (Paraguay)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)