The story
The airline was established in 1980 and is wholly owned by the Pivcevic family. "DAP" is the acronym of its creator, Domingo Andrés Pivcevic, a Punta Arenas businessman. Its first flight was with a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter that to this day flies with the company.
Realising the need for air transport in the area of Magallanes, the company acquired a Piper PA-31 Navajo that it employed for a couple of years, before replacing it with two Cessna 402 units and a Beechcraft King Air 100. Its first operations were between Punta Arenas, Porvenir, Puerto Williams and Puerto Natales, with some charter operations to other cities of Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the company flew from Punta Arenas to the Falkland Islands, for which it soon incorporated two Boeing 727-100 units that operated the Santiago-Punta Arenas-Mount Pleasant route. However, the three large commercial airlines in Chile (LAN Chile, Ladeco and National Airlines) worked together to bring prices down to fight the competition established by DAP, which finally retired from the market, filing a lawsuit citing unloyal competition. In 2007, DAP was paid a legal compensation by the offending airlines.
In over 36 years of continuous operation, DAP has not registered any accidents that put to risk life or limb of any passengers, including over 100.000 flight hours by its helicopter company DAP Helicópteros.
From Wikipedia’s article on Aerovías DAP, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4