On January 1, 1914,
while much of Europe was embroiled in a war. A small Benoist (pronounced Ben-wah or
Ben-weest) Model 14 seaplane took off from St. Petersburg,
Florida, and traveled 20 miles across Tampa
Bay to land in Tampa,
Florida. The pilot on this first commercial
airline voyage was Anthony Jannus. His paying passenger was the mayor of St
Petersburg, Abraham C. Pheil, who bought the first
airline ticket at auction for $400. (The airline donated the money to the city
for the purchase of harbor lights.)
That first flight included a stop in Tampa
Bay to repair a drive chain, which
would be a recurring problem with the Benoist.
It’s ironic that the first commercial flight also had the world's first
airline delay.
The pilot on that historic flight was Antony H. Jannus, a
Benoist test pilot and instructor who was an aviation pioneer long before the
St. Pete-to-Tampa flight.
He had taken Captain Albert Berry to make the first
parachute jump from an airplane on March
1, 1912. Jannus did flying demonstrations for Benoist planes
throughout the Midwest and was a contestant at a Chicago
air show in September 1912. Later that month, he established an American
passenger-carrying record by taking three men with him on a 10-minute flight.
On November 6, 1912,
Jannus and J.D. Smith, who was his mechanic left Omaha
for New Orleans in an attempt to
set a distance record for winged aircraft. The flight of 1,973 miles took six
weeks because of stops for exhibitions, a near-disastrous fire, various
repairs, and a appendicitis attack. But Jannus was still hailed in the
newspapers as "the pioneer flying-boat pilot of the world."
Soon after the New Orleans
flight, he set a "continuous flight with passenger" record by flying
251 miles from Paducah, Kentucky,
to St. Louis MO
in four hours and 15 minutes. Jannus also made air-to-ground radio tests for
the Signal Corps during that flight.
Tony Jannus was a native of Washington D.C. Born in 1889; he
was employed by the Emerson Marine Engine Co. in Alexandria,
Virginia.
By chance in November of 1910. Emerson Marine sent Tony to install a
marine engine in a modified Curtiss-type airplane in College
Park, Maryland. It was at this
time Tony fell in love with flying. He had received only basic instructions
(which was standard procedure in those early days) and soon became very active
in aviation. Benoist hired him as a
flying instructor in St. Louis in
1911.
Tony came to St. Petersburg
with the airboat and once the plane was reassembled from the rail trip, he flew
test flights in preparation for the newly formed passenger service. Tony Jannus
was the pilot of that first scheduled passenger airline flight on January 1, 1914, for a very simple
reason. He knew the plane and also how to fly it!
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