World's First Winged Airline - The Beginning of Air Charter

Scheduled service on the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line in the winter of 1914 treated a passenger or two to a wooden seat, fresh Florida air--and salt spray in the face.



St. Petersburg, Florida, is not generally considered a city that can boast of an aviation "first." But on January 1, 1914, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line was born there--the world's first scheduled airline using winged aircraft. A plaque on the entrance to St. Petersburg International Airport proclaims: "The Birthplace of Scheduled Air Transportation."

Traveling in that first passenger airplane made of wood, fabric and wire was a far cry from flying in today's comfortable, air-conditioned airliner. From all accounts, however, those first airline flights were not so bad, provided you did not mind sitting out in the breeze with water spraying in your face. Passengers sat on a wooden seat in the hull of a two-place seaplane that did not have a windshield and rarely flew more than five feet above the water. That is the way it was on that momentous day in sunny Florida only a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C.