ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Historian Rui Farias calls it “gigantic.”

Chris Minner, an executive vice president at Tampa International Airport, thinks it was “revolutionary.”

And leaders in St. Petersburg think so highly of it, there are not one but two memorials marking the event in the span of just a couple hundred feet.

What You Need To Know

  •  The first commercial flight in history happened in 1914

  •  Pilot Tony Jannus flew from St. Petersburg to Tampa

  •  The seaplane’s flight took 23 minutes and landed on the Hillsborough River

  • A former mayor paid $400 to be the first passenger

The event happened in 1914, 110 years ago. It involved a 24-mile, 23-minute flight carrying two people in one plane.

It lifted off from St. Petersburg, right near where Albert Whitted Airport currently stands. The seaplane touched down on the Hillsborough River in Tampa less than half an hour later.

It was the first scheduled commercial flight in history.

A man named Percival Elliott Fansler had come up with the idea of the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. At the time, it took more than six hours to travel between the two cities either by boat or train.

“It was a day’s journey just to get between the two cities,” Farias, the executive director at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, said.

Fansler partnered with Thomas Benoist, an aviation entrepreneur to design the plane. The duo then enlisted Tony Jannus, a famous daredevil-playboy pilot, to fly the plane. A.C. Phiel, a former mayor of St. Petersburg, paid $400 to be the first passenger.

“Huge chunk of change, more than $8,000 today, for a one-way ticket from St. Pete to Tampa,” Farias said.

A crowd of people watched the seaplane take off. Another crowd came to see it land on the other side of the Bay. When it was over, the simple flight had made aviation history.

“The reality is without that first flight here in Tampa Bay, the industry today could not look the way that it does,” said Minner, an executive vice president at Tampa International Airport.

Minner noted that before that St. Pete-to-Tampa flight, there were zero passengers flying. Now, Minner said the industry is expecting 1 billion passengers worldwide this year alone.

The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line was short-lived. It only lasted a few months, offering two flights a day, six weeks a day for $5 per person. Passenger interest waned, though, and the flight stopped due to financial concerns.

Yet the flight’s legacy and what it sparked lived on.

“The short flight from St. Petersburg to Tampa ignited an industry that changed the way we travel,” then-President Barack Obama said on the flight’s 100th anniversary in 2014.

In 1964, the Tampa and St. Petersburg Chambers of Commerce established the Tony Jannus Distinguished Aviation Society. It recognizes people who contribute to the scheduled aviation industry.

There is now an exhibit telling the story of the flight at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, as well as a memorial at the nearby St. Pete Pier area.