What was the first commercial airline?

Answer 1

the business of transporting paying passengers and freight by air along regularly scheduled routes, typically by airplanes but also by helicopter.
Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin set up the first commercial airline in 1912, using a form of the dirigible to transport more than 34,000 passengers before World War I. Early air travel began with balloons (first flown by two Frenchmen in 1783), gliders (first flown in 1809), and ultimately airplanes (a Frenchman Clement Ader, flew his steam-powered plane, the Eole, in 1890). Prior to World War I, the public’s interest in flying was peaked by demonstrations and airplane races; during the war, government subsidies and demands for new airplanes vastly improved techniques for designing and building them. Following the war, the first commercial airplane routes were set up in Europe, using wartime pilots and decommissioned war planes—often passengers were seated in chairs set up in old bombers. During the 1920s, European governments heavily subsidized the establishment of such well-known commercial airlines as British Airways, Air France, and KLM.
In the United States, commercial airlines developed more slowly. The U.S. Post Office established an air mail service in 1919 and played an important role in developing air travel by setting up a nationwide system of airports. In 1925 the U.S. government began paying generous subsidies to private carriers to deliver the mail, and some companies began hauling passengers as well. Many well-known U.S. carriers were established during this period, including Pan Am (founded in 1928; now defunct), United Airlines (created in 1931 by a merger between several older mail carrying operations), American Airlines (created in 1930 out of several mail carriers), TWA (1928; now merged with American), and Delta (1929).

Answer 2

On November 16, 1909, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin and a group of entrepreneurs created the first passenger airline, called Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien Gesellschaft (DELAG).

Between 1910 and 1914, DELAG carried 35,000 passengers around Germany via "zepplins," a form of airship named after their inventor. Tickets cost 100 to 200 reichsmarks each and were sold mostly to wealthy foreign tourists. World War I interrupted service, and flights were briefly resumed after the war.

The world's first scheduled passenger airline using an airplane was probably the St. Petersburg-Tampa Air Line (also called the "Airboat Line"). On January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus flew one passenger across Florida's Tampa Bay in a Benoist type XIV flying boat. While it only operated for three or four months, the airline's twice daily roundtrips greatly influenced commercial aviation.
Another early pioneer offered a scheduled passenger service in California. Silas Christofferson seems to have had a short-lived service flying people between the ports of San Francisco and Oakland in 1913. Unfortunately, few details about this airline are available on the Web.

source:
http://ask.yahoo.com/20040615.html

Answer 3

I believe it was Pan American

Answer 4

pan am? i think