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.
To put this achievement in perspective, consider this: On Jan. 1, 1914, one commercial passenger flew on one commercial flight. On Jan. 1, 2014, an estimated 8 million people flew on nearly 100,000 flights.
Statistics from the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, show that some 3.1 billion people flew in 2013, surpassing the 3 billion mark for the first time ever. That figure is expected to grow to 3.3 billion by 2014 and represents about 44 percent of the world’s population.
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.To put this achievement in perspective, consider this: On Jan. 1, 1914, one commercial passenger flew on one commercial flight. On Jan. 1, 2014, an estimated 8 million people flew on nearly 100,000 flights.Statistics from the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, show that some 3.1 billion people flew in 2013, surpassing the 3 billion mark for the first time ever. That figure is expected to grow to 3.3 billion by 2014 and represents about 44 percent of the world’s population.
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