Avianca still operates to this day and claims SCADTA's history as its own, thus making it the world's second-oldest active airline, after KLM from the Netherlands.

The German nationality of some of SCADTA's owners motivated the United States government to subsidize Pan American World Airways' expansion in Latin America under the Hoover administration.

SCADTA was barred from operating flights to the United States and the Panama Canal, although it continued to maintain a broad route network throughout the Andean region.

Prior to World War II, principal shareholder and Austrian industrialist Peter Paul von Bauer was forced by the US governments to sell his shares to the Pan American World Airways in an attempt to protect the airline from acquisition by Nazi Germany.

Many of the airline's pilots, technicians, and key administrators were German or Austrian, even though most had lived in Colombia for several years, the United States was afraid that the SCADTA pilots were engaged in espionage, and could be plotting to convert civilian aircraft into bombers, in order to attack the Panama Canal.