Tony Jannus: The Pilot Who Launched Commercial Aviation from Tampa Bay

The ticket cost $400. The flight lasted 23 minutes. The airplane was an open-cockpit biplane with a 75-horsepower engine, cruising 50 feet above Tampa Bay on New Year’s Day, 1914. That single trip from St. Petersburg to Tampa was the world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight, and the 24-year-old pilot at the controls would be dead within three years.

A Test Pilot at 21

Tony Jannus was born in Washington, D.C., in 1889, the son of a patent attorney. He took his first flight lesson in 1910 at College Park Airport in Maryland and within a year was working as a test pilot for aircraft manufacturer Thomas Benoist in St. Louis. By 1912, he had piloted the airplane from which Albert Berry made the first parachute jump, and later that year he set a 1,900-mile overwater flight record following the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from Omaha to New Orleans. He once won a four-cylinder engine air race from St. Louis to Omaha with only three cylinders running. People described him as a well-bred, lovable gentleman. At Christmas in 1914, he dressed as Santa Claus and parachuted toys out of a plane for children below.

Twenty-Three Minutes Across the Bay

On January 1, 1914, more than 3,000 people lined the St. Petersburg waterfront to watch Jannus taxi a Benoist XIV flying boat into the water near the Municipal Pier. His lone passenger was Abram C. Pheil, the former mayor of St. Petersburg, who had won the seat at auction for $400 (about $11,200 today). At 10:00 a.m., the biplane lifted off, climbed to 50 feet, and headed northeast across Tampa Bay. Twenty-three minutes later, Jannus splashed down at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in Tampa, where another 3,500 people were waiting and cheering. The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line ran two flights daily, six days a week, at a regular fare of $5 per person. Over four months it carried 1,205 passengers without a single injury. Jannus’s brother Roger served as the second pilot.

Gone at 27

After the airline folded in April 1914, Jannus joined the Curtiss Aeroplane Company as a test pilot and was sent to Russia in 1915 to train military pilots during World War I. On October 12, 1916, his aircraft suffered engine failure over the Black Sea near Sevastopol, killing Jannus and two Russian students. He was 27. His body was never recovered. Today, the Tony Jannus Award is given annually for outstanding achievement in commercial aviation, with past recipients including Charles Lindbergh and Chuck Yeager. A replica of his Benoist XIV hangs in the St. Petersburg Museum of History. In 2010, the State of Florida designated him a “Great Floridian.”