The company would go out of business shortly after its founder Rodman Wanamaker died in May 1928. and H.-16 Flying Boats into passenger machines, some of which were capable of carrying up to 14 to 16 passengers. Soon after the Armistice, American Trans-Oceanic Co. It is not known when it officially went out of business.įlew between Miami and the British island of Bimimi. Unlike most of the other operators of this era who would go out of business after only a few years (or in many cases a few months) of operation, Chalk’s bankruptcy would come years later when the United States Department of Transportation revoked its flying charter in 2007.įlew surplus wartime flying boats between New York and Atlantic City. In fact, many of the most prominent gangsters of the era used Chalk’s, including Al Capone. It operated scheduled seaplane services from Florida to the Bahamas, and during Prohibition was a major source of alcohol smuggled from the Bahamas to the United States.

Starting ad-hoc charter operations as the Red Arrow Flying Service it would take on various names until becoming Chalk’s International Airlines. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line would go on to fly two flights per day for the next four months, though the company would go out of business after four months of operation. Though rarely exceeding an altitude of 5 feet above the water, the flying boat reduced the time of the otherwise 2 hour boat trip to 23 minutes. Petersburg to Tampa, Florida carrying its first passenger, former St. On January 1, 1914, a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C., a two seat flying boat built by Thomas Benoist and piloted by Antony H. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line ( See photo) passenger airliners leading up to the first passenger flight of Western Air Express in 1926, which began what is claimed to be the first “year-round overland passenger airline transportation service” in the United States: Inaugurated Passenger Service Western Air Express’s success would be followed by that of other CAM carriers, many of whom would also go on to become major players in the airline industry including CAM-5 carrier Varney Airlines (which would later be acquired by Boeing and eventually merged with United Airlines) and CAM-2 carrier Robertson Aircraft Corporation with chief pilot Charles Lindbergh (which would become American Airlines, currently the largest airline in the world).īelow is a list of some of the earliest known U.S.

4” (CAM-4), Western Air Express (which would eventually become Western Airlines before joining the Delta family in 1986). passenger air travel, the first airline to break through to economic success would be the original operator of “mail route no. Turning the tide on a trend of failed ventures in early U.S. government and Postal Service that began operations in 1926. As detailed in the article The Birth of Commercial Aviation, the first successful airlines in the United States emerged from the Contract Air Mail (CAM) carriers established by the U.S.

First airplane