Of course I had to try and get to the bottom of this one.
Seems that PAISA was not COPA of Panama under a different name, but was actually a joint venture between Viasa the main Venezuela airline and KLM. The latter had a longstanding management contract to effectively run Viasa, which was part owned by the two Venezuelan domestic carriers, LAV and Avensa. The latter was in turn long half owned by Pan Am. Now Avensa had been a pioneer purchaser of DC9s, to supplement their single old ex-Varig Caravelle (which carried on for many years afterwards), and it was one of these which was supplied to run the Paisa routes, apparently on just a couple of days a week. That DC9 purchase would of course have to be OK'd by Pan Am as half owner - who would have thought that Juan Trippe once signed off on an early DC9-10 order.
A web search for "PAISA DC9" turns up a photo
https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgu...act=mrc&uact=8 of one in their name. In best Viasa style, it is the right hand side of the aircraft. Because they were the past masters at painting shared aircraft with a different airline colour scheme on each side, they did it on several KLM DC-8s and even DC-10s, the mainstream owner on the left side (which is the one passengers see most at boarding) and the shared company livery on the other side. I'm guessing that's the blue Avensa cheatline of the era, just with a different title, and that it said Avensa on the left. The aircraft remained fully operated by and registered to Avensa. KLM transferred two of their pioneer DC9-10s to Curacao to be run by ALM around the Caribbean and to Caracas etc, and will surely have done some shared maintenance etc on them for Avensa.
So there we go. A DC9-10, an obscure South Anmerican operator, KLM, Juan Trippe, and our old friend the Caravelle. All in one post !