The first airline, by boat
The first scheduled airline service with a paid passenger did not use a runway. On 1 January 1914 a small flying boat, a Benoist, took off from the water at St. Petersburg, Florida, and landed in Tampa about 23 miles away, twenty minutes later. A former mayor of St. Petersburg is said to have paid for the first seat at an auction, and the regular fare after that was five dollars.
The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line was the idea of a local businessman, Percival Fansler. The two cities faced each other across the bay, and the trip by steamer took two hours, while the trip by rail was a long detour around the water. An aircraft with a single passenger and a pilot, Tony Jannus, beat both.
A short life
The line flew twice a day and carried about twelve hundred passengers in its few months of life. When the winter visitors left, so did the traffic, and the service ended after about four months. It was a short-lived experiment, but it had shown that people would pay for speed.
A replica of the Benoist stands today in a museum in St. Petersburg. In Europe the first long-term airline services began in the years just after the First World War, and the companies that began then, among them KLM, are still flying today.