The airline was established as Compañía Panameña de Aviación (hence the acronym COPA) on June 21, 1944 and started operations on August 15, 1947. It was founded by a group of prominent Panamanian investors with assistance from Pan American, which took a 32% stake. It began operations with domestic flights operated by a small fleet of Douglas DC-3 and Douglas C-47 aircraft. The airline started its first international flights in the 1960s when services were inaugurated to cities in Jamaica, Colombia, and Costa Rica. It became wholly Panamanian owned in 1971.
Until the early 1980s, the airline had significant competition from Air Panama, until then, a better known airline to the international public. In order to compete with Air Panama, Copa discontinued its domestic flights in 1979 and acquired its first jet, a Boeing 737-100. It also inaugurated flights to San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as to the Dominican Republic and Miami, Florida. Thus, the Boeing 737 became the only aircraft in its fleet until the introduction of the Embraer 190 in 2005.
Expansion continued during the 1990s, when service was started to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Santiago, Chile, Bogotá, Colombia, Havana, Cuba,Guayaquil, Ecuador, Lima, Peru, Mexico City, Mexico, Caracas, Venezuela, and many other important Latin American cities.
In 2000, Copa Airlines inaugurated services to Los Angeles, Cancún, and Orlando, as well as to São Paulo; in 2001 it began serving Quito, Ecuador. In 2004 it began service to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It also announced in August of that year a code-sharing alliance with Mexico's Mexicana de Aviación, which lasted until 2007.
On December 15, 2005, Copa Holdings, S.A., the parent company of Copa Airlines, launched an IPO of 14 million shares in the New York Stock Exchange thus becoming the fourth Latin American airline to be traded in the exchange, the other three being LAN Airlines of Chile and Brazilian carriers Gol Transportes Aéreos and TAM Brazilian Airlines |
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