February 20, 2022 - St. Petersburg, Florida - Sunset Beach

After lunch, we walked to the end of the St. Pete pier and checked out Tampa Bay.

Looking northwest at the pink Vinoy, a four-star hotel.  It's an historic Mediterranean Revival-style hotel opened in 1925 as the Vinoy Park Hotel.

Then we checked out the St. Pete Museum of History.

 

The first thing we saw was this seaplane hanging in the main lobby.  It turns out it was the world's first airliner!

 

In 1914 an airplane service across Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa and back was initiated, generally considered the first scheduled commercial airline flight. The first flight took former mayor Abe Pheil to Tampa.  The company name was the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, and the pilot was Tony Jannus flying a Benoist XIV flying boat.  (The Tony Jannus Award is presented annually for outstanding achievement in the airline industry.)

 

The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line was the brainchild of P.E. Fansler, who was inspired after reading of Tony Jannus's flight down the Mississippi River in the late fall of 1912.   Jannus became one of the two pilots who flew the Airboat Line's twice-a-day round trips.  Tony's brother Roger was the other pilot.  Roger was killed in 1918 flying in World War One aerial combat.  The Airboat Line only operated for three months, from January to April 1914.

 

Thomas Benoist was the designer and manufacturer of the seaplane.  He also ran a flying school in St. Pete.  The Benoist Company, started in 1910, went on to build 107 planes of some 17 different models.  Just as the flood of government contracts for airplanes for World War One occurred, Benoist was tragically killed in 1917 while stepping off a city trolley and hitting his head on a telephone pole.  "If it were not for that street car accident," wrote aviation pioneer Glen L. Martin, many years later, "you would probably be riding a Benoist airplane today!"

 

This is a replica of Benoist Model 14B Serial Number 43 built in the spring of 1913, the airplane that became the world's first airliner on January 1, 1914.   It took two years just to do the research to build the replica, since no plans were available.  Researchers closely photographed the remains of Benoist Model 12 landplane owned by the Smithsonian.   After a two-year build and some test flights from Lake Tarpon, the Benoist recreated on January 1, 1984 its St. Petersburg to Tampa flight to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the world's first scheduled airline flight in 1914.  The Benoist replica flew a total of four hours and 24 minutes before being retired and displayed in a museum.

The museum had a very interesting baseball collection section called Schrader's Little Cooperstown consisting of  more than 5,000 signed baseballs.  It holds the Guinness world record holder for the largest collection of autographed baseballs in the world.

 

I'm not a Yankee fan but they have had some giants of the game play for them.