If you’re not familiar with aviation history, you might think the world’s first commercial winged airline started in a big city, like New York, London or Berlin.
Nope.
It was in St. Petersburg, Florida. Called the St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line, the airline, which was established in 1914, had a total fleet of 2 planes. Well, they were actually airboats made by the Benoist Aeroplane Company. They were mainly used to fly things between the two cities, although they could accept a passenger or two, for the cost of $5 per direction (that’s about $152 in today’s money – to fly the 24 miles between Tampa and St. Pete).
From then and there, airlines started around the world. The UK’s Aircraft Transport and Travel in 1916. Germany’s Deutsche Luft-Reederei in 1917. Other airlines in Norway, Denmark, France and Switzerland in the years after that.
In 1919, the first airline that’s still in existence today, began – KLM, based out of The Netherlands. Colombia’s Avianca followed a few months later. Qantas came on the scene in late 2020, and Aeroflot came about a year and change after them.
In the U.S., Delta Air Lines started (albeit under a different name) in 1925, while both American Airlines and United Airlines were established in 1926.
Other names, now gone but fondly remembered, among others, were Pan American World Airways (a.k.a. Pan Am – although no longer an airline, there’s actually one division of Pan Am that’s still running), TWA (they acquired the Trans World Airways name in 1950 but the airline got its start in 1928), and Eastern Air Lines (1926).
Colloquially known as Eastern, it was headed by WW1 flying ace Eddie Rickenbacher (who had his own rather colorful history). Based in Miami, Eastern pretty much had a monopoly on the various New York-Florida routes from the 1930s to the 1950s and still dominated the same market for decades afterwards (I remember when Eastern was “the official airline of Walt Disney World. That’s the airline we used on our first visit there, in the late 1970s).
The good times couldn’t last forever though, and by the late 1980s or so, Eastern was starting to bleed money. The airline was sold – Eastern Air Lines Shuttle (a shuttle that serviced the northwest) went to then-real estate mogul Donald Trump (who named it the Trump Shuttle. That company closed by the early 1990s), while Eastern Air Line was sold to Continental Airlines (which eventually merged with United in 2012).
So the airline was gone, but its intellectual property was still up for grabs.
From Simple Flying:
In 2011, a group bought the trademarks and intellectual property rights of the defunct carrier, and in 2014 filed an application to begin service in the US. It began using Boeing 737s to provide wet lease services out of Miami International in late 2014, using the traditional ‘hockey stick’ livery.
Joe and I flew on one of their planes during our trip to Cuba in March, 2016.
Meanwhile, in 2018, the intellectual property rights to the Eastern Airlines brand were sold again, this time to Dynamic Airways, based in Miami. Their plan was to use the Eastern name and offer regular international commercial passenger service, starting in January 2020.
Well, you know what the pandemic had to say about that. So they switched gears and started carrying cargo.
However to maintain their FAA certification to carry passengers (because they’d eventually like to expand to be an international passenger carrier, as originally planned), there’s one commercially scheduled passenger flight monthly between Miami and Santo Domingo.
Oh, and they’re apparently using one of the last (if not THE last) passenger Boeing 767-200s still in service.
Here’s a video that can explain it all a whole lot better than I can:
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