St. PetersburgTampa Airboat Line: World’s First Scheduled Airline Using Winged Aircraft

Aviation History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The first of the two Model 14 Benoist airboats, No. 43, arrived by train from Paducah, Ky., and was promptly assembled. It weighed 1,250 pounds, was 26 feet long and had a wingspan of 44 feet. Although the plane was built to hold only a pilot and one passenger on a single seat, sometimes two small passengers could be accommodated. Tony Jannus gave it two test flights on December 30 and 31, 1913, accompanied on one of them by Benoist’s chief mechanic, J.D. Smith, and on the other by a local man named J.G. Foley.

Smith, whom Jannus called ‘Smitty, the Infallible,’ was especially adept at maintaining the Roberts 6-cylinder, in-line, liquid-cooled, 75-hp engines that Benoist used in his planes. Smith had raced motorcycles as a young man, and when he read about Benoist in 1912, he left his home in Jamestown, Pa., for the St. Louis plant. Benoist found him voluntarily sweeping snow off a plane in subfreezing weather and hired him on the spot.

The hull of the Benoist flying boat was made of three layers of spruce with fabric between each layer. The Roberts engine and a pusher propeller gave the aircraft a top speed of 64 mph. The wings were of linen stretched over spruce spars. It was claimed, though not accurately, that the Benoist was the only plane in the world at the time that had the engine placed down in the hull. The plane was touted for publicity purposes as ‘a motor boat with wings and an air propeller.’ It was priced at $4,250.

Although this early Benoist had greater stability than later models, the low placement of the engine proved to be a maintenance headache. The propeller had to be located high enough to avoid the water spray, and the connection between the engine in the hull and the pusher propeller required a chain drive that often slipped off its track. Later Benoist models had one or two 100-hp Roberts direct-drive engines mounted under the top wing.

By New Year’s Day of 1914, the continual attention the local paper was giving to the promised inauguration of scheduled flights had built up intense interest in the new venture. After a parade from downtown St. Petersburg to the waterfront, an Italian band from the Johnny Jones Show played at the municipal pier as Jannus readied the airboat for flight. A crowd of 3,000 looked on while a ticket for the first flight round-trip to Tampa on the airline was auctioned off. Former Mayor Abraham C. Pheil won the honor of being the first airline passenger with a bid of $400. The airline donated the money to the city for the purchase of harbor lights.

Fansler made a short speech as the airboat was being placed in the water, ‘What was impossible yesterday is an accomplishment today, while tomorrow heralds the unbeliev able,’ he concluded. At 10 a.m. the ex-mayor donned a raincoat, stepped gingerly into the hull and sat on the small wooden seat beside the pilot. Jannus started the two-cycle engine and tested the controls. He waved to the crowd, taxied out and took off into history. Halfway to Tampa, however, the engine began misfiring, and he landed in the bay briefly to adjust it. He took off again and, 23 minutes after the original takeoff, landed at the entrance to the Hillsborough River before an excited crowd of 2,000.

Police held the crowd back as Jannus and Pheil obliged a cameraman who asked them to pose for pictures. A reporter from the Tampa Tribune asked Pheil why his hands were all greasy. He replied that it was from ‘assisting Mr. Jannus to adjust some machinery.’ Pheil went to a telephone and called St. Petersburg to announce their arrival.

Jannus and Pheil left Tampa for the return trip at 11 a.m. and arrived back in St. Petersburg before another cheering crowd. Just before the afternoon flight, a second auction was held, with Noel A. Mitchell the successful bidder for a round-trip flight at $175. The next day, Mrs. L.A. Whitney, wife of the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, made the flight to Tampa and back to become the first woman passenger to fly on a fixed-wing scheduled airline. (Actually, Mae Peabody of Dubuque, Iowa, was the first woman to make a local flight out of St. Petersburg.) Whitney described the flight as ‘the most delightful sensation imaginable–it is like being rocked to sleep in your mother’s arms.’

Tags: Aircraft, Aviation History, Flight Technology

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.