From the Wall Street Journal:
January 1, 2014 11:37 AM
First Airline Offered No Frills, Many Thrills
Florida Organizers Stage Centennial Re-Enactment to Celebrate Inaugural Commercial Flight
By SUSAN CAREY
Fliers frustrated with the discomforts of modern air travel might spare a thought this week for what flying was like a century ago when the first scheduled commercial airline in the world launched its inaugural flight from a Florida yacht basin.
On Jan. 1, 1914, a wood-and-muslin Benoist XIV flying boat, powered by a noisy, six-cylinder, 75-horsepower engine, took off from St. Petersburg, Fla., with its pilot and one passenger sitting on a small wooden bench, exposed to the elements. The rickety seaplane traveled 18 miles as the crow flies, landing in the Hillsboro River off Tampa, a 23-minute journey at speeds up to 60 miles an hour. Normally such a trip would take two hours on a steam ship across Tampa Bay.
The flight carried a former St. Petersburg mayor who paid $400—about $9,323 in current dollars—for the thrill. It was repeated many times over the next four months, during the short life of the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. Historians estimate that more than 1,200 passengers made the trip without mishap, paying $5 one-way, or $116.53 today.
To commemorate this aviation first—achieved a little more than a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright's famous flights in Kitty Hawk, N.C.—St. Petersburg organizers staged a re-enactment flight on Wednesday. But at the last minute, a reproduction Benoist (pronounced ben WAH) biplane, reverse-engineered to the last detail, didn't make the trip after all.
Instead, a 34-year-old experimental monoplane with a modern engine did the honors, flown by Tarpon Springs, Fla., architect Eddie Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman, age 62, said his late father built the varnished mahogany seaplane, nicknamed the Mullet Skiff for the flat-bottomed boats fisherman on the West Coast of Florida use to catch mullets with nets. (The late Mr. Hoffman also built a replica Benoist plane now hanging in the St. Petersburg Museum of History.)
The plane, officially a Hoffman X-4 model, took off at 10:03 ET Wednesday morning from a yacht basis in rainy St. Petersburg, and landed 28 minutes later in the waters off Tampa. Spectators huddling under umbrellas lined the waterfront as Mr. Hoffman touched down safely—but without a passenger.
Kermit Weeks, an aerobatic pilot from Polk City, Fla., raced last week to put finishing touches on his Benoist reproduction plane after he received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to test fly it. But on practice flights over the weekend at a lake on his Fantasy of Flight aviation attraction near Orlando, Mr. Weeks, 60, said he was unable to get the plane airborne, blaming suction from the water.
Over the past 100 years, flights have become far safer and more convenient, thanks to thousands of advances in airplane and air-traffic control technology, the rise of safety organizations like the FAA, better pilot training, and other improvements ranging from airsickness bags to flight attendants to in-flight Wi-Fi. The largest commercial airplane of the modern era, the Airbus A380, can hold up to 800 passengers, fly faster than 600 miles an hour, and go 8,500 nautical miles without refueling.
The early era of commercial flights, while technologically primitive, was a heyday for competition. The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line gave rise, almost immediately, to imitators, including an airline flying between the Los Angeles area and Catalina Island, off the Pacific coast, and a company that flew between New York and Atlantic City, N.J., in 1919, using war-surplus flying boats. Soon, another airline linked Florida and the Caribbean, according to the late aviation historian R.E.G. Davies. Today, four airlines control more than 80% of flights in the U.S.
Enthusiasts marked the anniversary—and the century of change it represents—with much fanfare. Mr. Weeks's Benoist plane, which he dissembled and hauled on a trailer to St. Petersburg on Monday, was the guest of honor in a tent at a "First Night" celebration in the city's downtown on New Year's Eve. He planned to show it off by taxiing it in the water on Wednesday.
St. Petersburg organizers are planning a series of events during the year to celebrate Florida's role in aviation history. The leading global airline trade group also plans to use the anniversary to trumpet the airline industry's progress this year.
Descendants of the inaugural flight's participants attended the St. Petersburg commemoration. Chuck Benoist, an 80-year-old nephew of the plane's designer, Thomas Benoist, said about 20 people from his family plan to travel to Florida for the event.
Mr. Benoist said his uncle, who got his start in the car-parts business in St. Louis, produced 118 planes of 17 types over 10 years, and operated flight schools in St. Louis, Chicago and finally Sandusky, Ohio. He died in 1917 at age 43 in a streetcar accident in Sandusky, his nephew said. His company ultimately collapsed.
Tony Jannus, pilot on the 1914 flight, had been Tom Benoist's chief pilot and student instructor. Mr. Jannus, a renowned aviator, disappeared over the Black Sea while training Russian pilots at the end of World War I.
The first passenger on that century-ago flight was Abe Pheil, who had just left office as St. Petersburg mayor. The first flight wasn't without incident. When the engine chain slipped off the propeller shaft, the airboat had to land in the water. The pilot and Mr. Pheil fixed the problem and "my grandfather arrived in Tampa with grease all over his hands," said Betsy Pheil, the late mayor's 73-year-old granddaughter.
Mr. Weeks started building the new Benoist more than two years ago. He said he has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Roberts engine alone, hiring a vintage automobile engine shop in Ohio to recreate it. But now that all the tooling has been done, he hopes to build three or four additional vintage engines and then create period planes around them.
While he is disappointed that the Benoist wasn't ready for takeoff on Wednesday, Mr. Weeks said the problems eventually will be sorted out. "In reality, goals are great," he said. "But it's all about the journey."
