The first airline to hold a scheduled service was the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. The service started in the winter of 1914, in St. Petersburg, Florida. The passengers sat on wooden seats in the hull of a two-place seaplane that did not have a windshield and rarely flew more than five feet above the water.
They enjoyed fresh Florida air and salt spray in their faces. The aircraft in St. Petersburg was a Benoist (pronounced Ben-wah or Ben-weest) Model 14, built by St. Louis manufacturer Thomas W. Benoist. He is known for the automobile self-starters and sparking batteries he manufactured, Benoist also built 17 various models of seaplanes and landplanes between 1910 and 1917.
His aircraft advertisement claimed: “My plane is figured down to the last equation, and improved up to the second. Every nut, bolt, wire, wood member, and piece of cloth is examined, tried and tested before it goes into our machines.”