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On November 16, 1909, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin and a group of entrepreneurs created the first passenger airline, called Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien Gesellschaft (DELAG). Between 1910 and 1914, DELAG carried 35,000 passengers around Germany via "zepplins," a form of airship named after their inventor. Tickets cost 100 to 200 reichsmarks each and were sold mostly to wealthy foreign tourists. World War I interrupted service, and flights were briefly resumed after the war. The world's first scheduled passenger airline using an airplane was probably the St.
Petersburg-Tampa Air Line (also called the "Airboat Line"). On January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus flew one passenger across Florida's Tampa Bay in a Benoist type XIV flying boat. While it only operated for three or four months, the airline's twice daily roundtrips greatly influenced commercial aviation. Another early pioneer offered a scheduled passenger service in California. Silas Christofferson seems to have had a short-lived service flying people between the ports of San Francisco and Oakland in 1913. Unfortunately, few details about this airline are available on the Web.
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