St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line: The World’s First Airline, Part 1

History is full of uncertainty and competing claims. And in the claim for the first scheduled airline there is also some debate. Aviation historian Roger Bilstein sheds doubt on the certainty of when the first scheduled passenger service in the United States began. Silas Christofferson carried passengers in 1913 by hydroplane between San Francisco and Oakland harbors. But records of Christofferson's service don't appear to exist. Delag, a German airline using dirigibles, operated a scheduled route between Freidrichshafen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Potsdam and Dresden from 1910 to 1914 and carried 37,000 passengers without mishap. German historians concede that the schedule was rarely kept.

The Pilot

The pilot on that historic flight was Antony H. Jannus, a Benoist test pilot and instructor who was an aviation pioneer before the St. Pete-to-Tampa flight. He had carried Captain Albert Berry aloft to make the first parachute jump from an airplane on March 1, 1912. Jannus flew exhibitions demonstrating Benoist planes throughout the Midwest and was a contestant at a Chicago air meet in September 1912. Later that month, he established an American passenger-carrying record by taking three men with him on a 10-minute flight. On November 6, 1912, flying an early model Benoist on a single float, Jannus and J.D. Smith (his mechanic) left Omaha for New Orleans in an attempt to set a distance record for winged aircraft. The flight took six weeks to make the 1,973-mile trip because of stops for exhibitions, a near-disastrous fire, repairs, and a bout with appendicitis. But Jannus was acclaimed in the newspapers as "the pioneer flying-boat pilot of the world." Soon after he set a "continuous flight with passenger" record by flying 251 miles from Paducah, Kentucky, to St. Louis in four hours and 15 minutes. Jannus also made air-to-ground radio tests for the Signal Corps.

Tony Jannus was a native of Washington D.C. Born in 1889; he was employed as a young adult by the Emerson Marine Engine Co. in Alexandria, Virginia. Fate intervened in November of 1910. Emerson Marine sent Tony to install a marine engine in a modified Curtiss-type airplane in College Park, Maryland. Tony fell in love with flight. He received only cursory instructions (as was the norm in those early days) and was soon a very active aviator. Benoist hired him as a flying instructor in St. Louis in 1911.

Tony came to St. Petersburg with the airboat and once the plane was reassembled from

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