Expert Opinion
AIN Blog: The Real First Scheduled Air Passenger Service
First Schedule Air Passenger Service Was In California
Augustus Roy Knabenshue built the airship Pasadena in 1912. (Photo: Pasadena Museum of History)
Augustus Roy Knabenshue built the airship Pasadena in 1912. (Photo: Pasadena Museum of History)

The first scheduled commercial airline service was operated on Jan. 1, 1914, with a flight between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Fla., in a Benoist biplane flying boat.

That’s what Wikipedia would have us believe. And the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum agrees. There’s even a plaque marking the event in St. Petersburg.

Now that’s all well and good, but as 19th-century American humorist Charles Farrar Brown put it, “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” And so it is with that 23-minute flight by the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line 98 years ago.