On New Year’s Day, 1914, when the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line launched the world’s first scheduled, commercial airline service to connect the two Florida cities, few among even the most optimistic observers present would likely have envisaged a day when around 600 passengers could travel over 8,000 nm on a double-decked Airbus A380 jumbo liner. The 23-mile hop across Tampa Bay—at barely five feet above the waves—was certainly a “one small step, one giant leap” moment, albeit the service in the Benoist Type XIV aircraft lasted less than five months, providing, for a $5 one-way fare, a 23-minute alternative to a two-hour boat voyage or a drive that could take as long as 20 hours.
In something of a “back to the future” ironic twist, the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line’s 109-year-old business model was fundamentally quite similar to the new air taxi services now promised by the 21st-century transportation revolutionaries working to use eVTOL aircraft for so-called urban air mobility (UAM) services. Early applications of all-electric vehicles, typically carrying just two to four passengers, largely consist of short flights of between 20 and 100 miles intended to bypass congested roads within large cities, and in some cases support slightly longer sub-regional services.
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