America's first airline passenger paid 400 dollars for a wooden bench
On January 1, 1914, Tony Jannus flew a Benoist flying boat of wood and muslin from St. Petersburg to Tampa, skimming about 15 metres above the bay for 23 minutes. His passenger, a former St. Petersburg mayor, paid 400 dollars to sit on an open-cockpit wooden bench, launching the first scheduled commercial airline flight in the United States.
The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line survived only about four months, yet carried more than 1,200 passengers at 5 dollars each. Europe had moved earlier and in a stranger direction. The world's first passenger airline, DELAG, founded in Germany in November 1909, flew Zeppelin airships and ran a regular service from 1910 until 1935. France's Compagnie générale transaérienne, founded a month earlier, is the oldest airline company and later became part of Air France.
After the First World War, surplus military planes became airliners. Aircraft Transport and Travel, the distant ancestor of British Airways, opened the world's first daily international service between Hounslow Heath and Paris on August 25, 1919, and Handley Page converted bombers into 12-seaters for the same route. KLM, founded by Albert Plesman and first flying in 1920 from Croydon to Amsterdam, is the oldest airline still using its original name. In April 1925 an Imperial Airways flight from London to Paris screened The Lost World, the first in-flight film on a scheduled service.
Early European cabins favoured roomy luxury over speed, and weather delays were routine given basic navigation. Airships still crossed oceans: the Graf Zeppelin ran to South America about every two weeks from 1931 to 1937, and the Hindenburg made 36 Atlantic crossings before crashing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in May 1937. From 1934 Lufthansa carried mail from Stuttgart via West Africa to Brazil, the first time an airline crossed an ocean.
By the end of the 1930s Aeroflot was the world's biggest airline, with about 3,000 aircraft, and in 1956 it began the first sustained regular jet service with the Tupolev Tu-104. Ownership swung from private founders to state carriers between the 1940s and 1980s, then back to privatisation, and European deregulation in the 1990s let budget carriers such as Ryanair and EasyJet grow at the flag carriers' expense.
Source: Airline
