Tony Jannus

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Tony Jannus (1889-1916), born Antony Habersack Jannus and sometimes reported as, Tony Janus, was an early American pilot who conducted the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight on January 1, 1914. The twenty-three minute flight traveled between Saint Petersburg, Florida and Tampa, Florida, passing some fifty feet above Tampa Bay in Jannus' Benoist biplane seaplane. The former mayor of Saint Petersburg, Abram C. Pheil, was the first person to purchase a ticket, having paid $400 at an auction for the privilege. Five dollars was the fare for all subsequent tickets for the flight.

Pheil and Mae Peabody, of Dubuque, Iowa, were the first passengers on the airline, flying across the bay to Tampa and, according to Karl Bickel of United Press, reportedly reaching the maximum speed of 75 miles per hour during the historic flight.

The flight was the first scheduled of the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line from what has become the St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, now designated by IATA as, PIE and by ICAO as, KPIE for international flights.

Jannus was killed on October 12, 1916 when his plane, a Curtiss H-7 he was testing for the czar of Russia for use in World War I, had engine problems and crashed into the Black Sea. His body was never recovered.

[edit] References

• Bickel, Karl A. - The Mangrove Coast, 1942 by Coward McCann, Inc., Fourth Edition in 1989 by Omni Print Media, Inc., p.265