The story
On the initiative of Victor Manuel Ferrucho, AeroTal was created and was based in Villavicencio. The objective was to make non-scheduled flights to Meta. He started with one Cessna 206 and one Piper PA-21. Then, with the closure of the Avianca base in the town of Villavicencio, it was decided by the AeroTal board to expand their route chart and retake destinations abandoned by the rival company Avianca.
In 1974, a bunch of Douglas DC-3 airplanes were also purchased to operate to new destinations. Those Douglas DC-3s were bought from Avianca and a new base of operations was made in Bogotá. A year later, LAN Airlines Sud Aviation Caravelle aircraft were acquired by AeroTal to operate the busiest routes of the company in Arauca and Leticia.
When there was specific transport of cargo, international charter flights were made, which in turn made the possibility of replacing the DC-4 with larger planes to cover for the mass international routes it had at that current time. At that time, the AeroTal board had no interest whatsoever in generating flights to the Eastern Plains. However they planned to make flights to the Eastern Plains when they started off in 1970 to make flights there.
That very same year the main trunk routes began to operate, such as Cali, San Andrés, among other routes. It was also decided by the AeroTal company board to suspend operations in Leticia to use the new jets on trunk air routes.
Three years later, a fourth Sud Aviation Caravelle was incorporated to AeroTal's fleet to accommodate for the enormous demand for the trunk air routes. That was when AeroTal changed its name to "Colombian Territorial Airlines". Then in 1979 the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) authorized cargo flights to Miami, for which a Boeing 707 was acquired through Leasing.
At the beginning of the early eighties, the company started getting routes to Pereira and Medellín. They were improving their markets greatly during that time and their position in the domestic market. When Aerocondor Colombia ceased operations, the airline saw the possibility of expanding. The company then ordered 720 and 727 aircraft, which operated on the companies most important routes. In 1981, promotions never before seen in Colombia were launched, with which tariff schemes were broken. These gave the idea of starting to operate passenger flights to Miami, temporarily from Barranquilla, Bogotá, Medellín and San Andrés.
From Wikipedia’s article on Aerotal, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3