Not a 1967 event
Commercial passenger flying began more than half a century before 1967. No airline “first” belongs to that year. The title of this article is also loosely worded, because there was no single first commercial airplane: what existed in the 1910s was a series of early passenger services using different aircraft in different countries. The best-known early example is the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, which began carrying paying passengers in Florida on 1 January 1914.
The Tampa Bay airboat line, 1914
The line was a short service across Tampa Bay, using a Benoist flying boat flown by Tony Jannus. It linked St. Petersburg and Tampa, a trip of a little over 20 miles that was slow by road and rail at the time. The first passenger, Abram Pheil, a former mayor of St. Petersburg, is reported to have paid $400 for the seat at an auction.
The aircraft carried one passenger at a time and the journey took around 20 to 30 minutes. The line ran for only a few months, and it closed in the spring of 1914 when the winter tourist season ended. It is nonetheless often described as the first scheduled airline service using heavier-than-air aircraft. It is safer to call it one of the first, since other early passenger flights and services existed, and sources differ on the exact claims.
Airships also carried passengers
Powered flight with a paying public had started even before aeroplanes became practical transports. A German company, DELAG, ran passenger flights in Zeppelin airships from 1910. These were airships, not airplanes, but they showed that people would pay to fly.
After the First World War
The war produced thousands of aircraft and trained pilots, and many were available cheaply afterwards. In 1919 several European services began, often using converted military machines:
- A service between Berlin and Weimar started in February 1919 in Germany.
- In August 1919 a company called Aircraft Transport and Travel began flights between London and Paris, one of the first daily international services.
- The Dutch airline KLM was founded in October 1919. It is often described as the oldest airline still operating under its original name.
- Qantas was founded in Australia in 1920.
Early passengers often sat in open cockpits or cramped, noisy cabins, and flights were generally limited to daylight and good weather. Flights were expensive, and many of the airlines survived only with government subsidies, frequently tied to carrying mail.
The interwar years
Through the 1920s and 1930s, airlines grew and aircraft changed. Imperial Airways was formed in Britain in 1924 to run longer routes to the Empire. In the United States, carrying the mail created a basis for commercial flying, and in the late 1920s larger planes such as the Ford Trimotor carried passengers on regular schedules. Pan American Airways began in 1927 with a short route from Key West to Havana and then grew into a major international carrier.
Aircraft design improved steadily. The Douglas DC-3, which first flew in December 1935, is often credited with making passenger flying profitable without relying on mail subsidies. Its range, reliability and capacity made it popular with airlines in many countries, and thousands were later built, including for military service in the Second World War. Large flying boats, such as those operated by Pan Am and Imperial Airways, served ocean routes before long-range landplanes took over.
After the war
The Second World War brought rapid technical progress. After 1945, airlines bought four-engined piston airliners and pressurised cabins to fly higher. By the early 1950s the first jets arrived with the de Havilland Comet, and the arrival of the Boeing 707 in 1958 began the jet age in earnest. By 1967 jets were the normal way to fly long distances, and the Boeing 747 was unveiled in September of that year.
What was happening in 1967
If a reader is looking for 1967 in the history of aviation, the relevant events are different: the Boeing 747 rollout, the unveiling of the Concorde airliner in Toulouse in December and a growing public sense of air travel as routine. None of these was a first for commercial flight itself. The industry had already existed for roughly fifty years.
How to think about “first”
Historians treat claims about the first airline cautiously for several reasons:
- Definitions differ. Is it the first paid flight, the first with a published timetable, the first with a company that lasted or the first with a heavier-than-air machine?
- Records from the period are incomplete, and national traditions each have their own claims.
- Short-lived services in 1910s Europe and America overlapped with each other.
For these reasons, this article gives the 1914 Florida service as an example and the interwar airlines as the beginning of lasting commercial aviation. It does not name an absolute first, because the evidence does not support one.