It was New Year’s Day, 1914. A crowd of 3,000 spectators, having paraded through the streets of St Petersburg in Florida to the accompaniment of what the local newspaper described as an Italian band, gathered at the waterfront. At an impromptu auction a former mayor, Abram C Pheil, paid $400 to become the first paying Passenger on the inaugural flight of the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat line. He clambered aboard the wooden flying boat, a Benoist XIV, joining the pilot, Tony Jannus, in the open-air cockpit.

The plane took off and completed the seventeen-mile journey across the bay to Tampa in twenty-three minutes, barely rising more than five feet above the water. Commercial aeroplane travel was born. Charging $5 for a one-way ticket and $5 per hundred pounds of freight, the airline carried 1,205 passengers and made 172 flights before it ceased trading on May 5, 1914.

Reflecting on the short life of the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat line, Thomas Benoist, the plane’s designer, prophesied that “someday people will be crossing oceans on airliners like they do on steamships today”. He was not wrong. In 2019, before the pandemic struck airlines carried 4.5 billion passengers, a staggering figure. Even in 2021 as the world made its first cautious steps to recovery, 2.2 billion passengers took to the air and the numbers this year are set to soar.

Benoist’s flying boat, though, was not the first successful commercial passenger aircraft. That honour goes to the Schwaben, a German rigid airship, which made its first commercial flight on July 16, 1911. It could carry twenty passengers, all of whom were accommodated under cover, and from March 1912 enjoyed the services of Heinrich Kubis, the world’s first air steward. On June 28, 1912, the airship was destroyed after breaking from its moorings in an airfield near Dusseldorf during a gale. By that time, it had made 218 flights and carried 1,553 passengers.

Between the two World Wars, aircraft technology advanced by leaps and bounds, extending the reach and capacity of planes, and making passenger flight commercially viable. The biggest challenge was to find a way to cross the Atlantic, notorious for its bad weather and lack of suitable stopping points. Boeing’s B-314 flying boat, a double-decker with a range of 3,500 miles and able to carry seventy-four passengers, rose to the challenge, enabling Pan American to run the first transatlantic passenger flight between New York and Marseilles on June 28, 1939. Passengers paid $350 for the privilege of crossing the Atlantic more quickly than sailing by liner.

Nowadays we travel to all parts of the globe, often within a day and often without changing planes, barely giving a thought to the technological developments that make this possible. What revolutionised air travel was the jet engine, which enabled aircraft to travel further, and faster, climb faster and fly higher, than planes powered by piston engines. It was the prospect of war and the desire to gain an advantage over the potential enemy rather than commercial forces that drove these advances in aircraft technology as we will find out next time.