The driving force behind the St. Petersburg­ Tampa Airboat Line was Percival Elliot Fansler, a Florida sales representative for Kahlenberg Brothers, a Wisconsin manufacturer of diesel engines for fishing boats. He became fascinated with Benoist’s progress in aircraft design and manufacture. He recalled later: “My appetite for speed was whetted by my experiences in racing boats. Having heard that Tony Jannus had made his famous trip down the Mississippi in a flying boat, I started correspondence with Tom [Benoist]. After receiving two or three letters that dealt with the details and capabilities of the boat, the idea popped into my head that instead of monkeying around with the thing to give ‘jazz’ trips, I would start a real commercial [air]line from somewhere to somewhere else. My experience in Florida led me to conclude that a line could be operated between St. Petersburg and Tampa. The distance was about 23 miles–some 15 of which were along the shore of Tampa Bay, and the remainder over open water. I wrote to Tom about the scheme and he became immediately enthusiastic.”

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Fansler agreed to go to Tampa, select a suitable seaplane route and make all the business arrangements. Benoist promised he would furnish three airboats, mechanics and pilots if Fansler was successful in getting some financial backing.

Fansler went to Tampa in late November 1913 but found no one there interested in issuing a contract for an airline franchise. On December 4, he went across Tampa Bay to St. Petersburg, then a city of only about 9,000 people during the winter months. “They thought I had a mighty clever idea,” he wrote later, “but they didn’t believe there was any such thing as a flying boat. I talked a group of a dozen men into putting up a guarantee of $100 each, and the Board of Trade came in with a like amount.”

Fansler immediately wired Benoist to come to St. Petersburg. On December 17, 1913, Benoist signed the world’s first airline contract for heavier-than-air planes–10 years to the day after the Wright brothers had first flown successfully at Kitty Hawk. (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 agreement called for a cash subsidy of $2,400 from the city of St. Petersburg, but only if the Benoist company supplied planes and pilots and maintained two scheduled flights daily between St. Petersburg and Tampa, six days a week for three months. Regular service was to begin on January 1, 1914. For each day that the scheduled flights were made on time, the city guaranteed to pay $40 a day through January and $25 a day in February and March.

The day after the contract signing, the St. Petersburg Times reported that “a fleet of hydro-aeroplanes” would make regular trips between St. Petersburg and Tampa, and predicted that the service would “prove to be of great benefit to the city.” When queried about the safety of the operation, Fansler said, “there is no more liability of accident in one of the boats than in an automobile, and the airboat will seldom be more than five feet above the water.”

Fansler, as general manager of the airline, fixed the price of a one-way ticket at $5 for the 22-minute trip. Passengers were allowed a maximum weight of 200 pounds gross, including hand baggage. “Excess weight [was] charged at $5 per hundred pounds, minimum charge 25 cents,” according to the handbills distributed throughout the two cities. Besides operating two scheduled flights per day, six days a week, Fansler recalled that “our agreement with our backers permitted us to indulge in special flights at any price we cared to name, and we made a number of these trips at $10 to $20 each.”

Charter flights could be arranged from St. Petersburg to several other Florida sites–Pass-a-Grille, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Bradenton, Sarasota, Palmetto, Safety Harbor and Egmont Key. Advertisements for these flights stated they would cost $15 and “trips covering any distance over water routes [would be made] from the waters’ surface to several thousand feet high at passenger request.”

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