It was Jan. 1, 1914, when a 25-year-old test pilot by the name of Tony Jannus flew aircraft designer Thomas Benoist’s wood-and-muslin “Flying Boat No. 43” across Tampa Bay and into aviation history. Though the journey lasted a paltry 23 minutes and had just one paying passenger (Abram Phell, then mayor of St. Petersburg, who paid $400 at auction), the trip would go down in the record books as the world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight.
The St. Petersburg to Tampa Airboat Line was the brainchild of Jacksonville-based electrical engineer Percival Fansler. According to archived reports of that fateful day 100 years ago, Fansler told a crowd of 3,000 gathered in St. Petersburg that the Airboat Line to Tampa would be “a forerunner of great activity.”
“What was impossible yesterday is an accomplishment of today -- while tomorrow heralds the unbelievable,” he said. Fansler’s rickety seaplane was powered by a noisy, six-cylinder, 75-horsepower engine and operated for just four months, but his ambition struck a chord with the public. He and his fellow aviation pioneers had unwittingly kickstarted an industry that today provides a kind of global connectivity that was “unbelievable” a century ago.
It was Jan. 1, 1914, when a 25-year-old test pilot by the name of Tony Jannus flew aircraft designer Thomas Benoist’s wood-and-muslin “Flying Boat No. 43” across Tampa Bay and into aviation history. Though the journey lasted a paltry 23 minutes and had just one paying passenger (Abram Phell, then mayor of St. Petersburg, who paid $400 at auction), the trip would go down in the record books as the world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight.The St. Petersburg to Tampa Airboat Line was the brainchild of Jacksonville-based electrical engineer Percival Fansler. According to archived reports of that fateful day 100 years ago, Fansler told a crowd of 3,000 gathered in St. Petersburg that the Airboat Line to Tampa would be “a forerunner of great activity.”“What was impossible yesterday is an accomplishment of today -- while tomorrow heralds the unbelievable,” he said. Fansler’s rickety seaplane was powered by a noisy, six-cylinder, 75-horsepower engine and operated for just four months, but his ambition struck a chord with the public. He and his fellow aviation pioneers had unwittingly kickstarted an industry that today provides a kind of global connectivity that was “unbelievable” a century ago.
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