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Nation's First Female Commercial Airplane Passenger—Photograph

Photographs can reveal information that would take many words to describe. By examining the actions, details, and environment revealed in photographs, we can learn many things about an event or the way people lived in different periods in history. The photograph below shows the first woman passenger of the nation's first commercial airline, which flew between Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Primary Source

There is a photo of the airplane used by the nation's first commercial airline, which ran between Tampa and St. Petersburg. In the plane are Tony Jannus, the pilot, and Mae Peabody, the nation's first female commercial airline passenger.

Source: Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of South Florida. Digitization provided by the USF Libraries Digitization Center.

Background

In the early 1900s, transportation in Florida was much slower than it is today. A trip from St. Petersburg to Tampa, a distance of about 25 miles, took 2½ hours by steamship. By train, it took 12 hours! In 1913, salesman Percival Elliot Fansler thought of a better way to travel the distance. He helped create the St. Petersburg to Tampa Airboat Line, the first commercial scheduled airline in the United States. Thomas W. Benoist, a St. Louis manufacturer, provided airboats—an early type of airplane—to the new business.

The first airboat used was a Benoist Model 14, described by the newspapers as “a motor boat with wings and an air propeller.” Soon, the line was ready for its first passenger! Abraham C. Pheil, the former Mayor of St. Petersburg, won this honor. On January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus flew Pheil from St. Petersburg to Tampa and back.

On January 2, 1914, Mae Peabody of Dubuque, Iowa, became the first woman passenger of the first commercial airline in the United States. Her trip took less than 30 minutes! Today, a plaque at the St. Petersburg International Airport reads, “The Birthplace of Scheduled Air Transportation,” honoring the creation of the nation's first commercial airline.