The Airplane - Jay Spenser [113]
Bigger still is the Antonov An-225 Mriya, a Russian strategic airlifter originally developed to transport oversize loads for that nation’s space program. Today in commercial service, the An-225 features two rows of seven wheels each on each side of the fuselage. Two side-by-side nose landing gear struts each mount another two wheels, for a grand total of thirty-two. This arrangement is necessary because by virtually any measure the An-225 is the world’s largest airplane. This aerial behemoth has a maximum gross weight of 1.4 million pounds (635,000 kilograms), a wingspan of 290 feet (88 meters), and an internal cargo capacity of 550,000 pounds (250,000 kilograms).
12 PASSENGER CABIN
VOYAGING ALOFT
…That I wouldn’t be surprised to see a railroad in the air, Or a Yankee in a flyin’ ship a goin’ most anywhere.
—“THE OLD WAY AND THE NEW,” A POEM BY JOHN H. YATES (1837–1900)
On January 1, 1914, the world’s first airline began operations in Florida. The St. Petersburg–Tampa Air Boat Line was a tiny outfit that transported one paying passenger at a time across Tampa Bay in a Benoist Model XIV. The one-way fare was $5.
The Benoist combined a wooden boat hull with biplane wings, a brass radiator, and a 75-hp inline engine turning a pusher propeller. The clattering engine was immediately behind the seats, and colorful pennants festooned the wing struts. The single passenger stepped aboard, helped by the proto-airline’s pilot, Tony Jannus, a twenty-four-year-old with a ready smile. Settling beside him in the open cockpit, this early air traveler found himself or herself exposed to the elements without so much as a windshield for protection.
It was thrilling, if not nerve-racking, but Jannus’ reassuring manner quickly put people at ease. Like the driver of a car, he leaned his elbow casually over the air boat’s gunwale as he taxied out onto the bay. Passengers could drag their hands in the water before takeoff and raise them in the slipstream during flight. It was like being in an aerial motorboat.
Carrying one passenger at a time, Florida’s St. Petersburg–Tampa Air Boat Line inaugurated the world’s first passenger ser vice in January 1914.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The St. Petersburg–Tampa Air Boat Line had convenience going for it, since flying across the bay took twenty-three minutes versus two hours to drive between the two towns. But with the end of the Florida tourist season, passenger demand dwindled and the company went out of business.
Even as Tony Jannus shuttled passengers around St. Petersburg, Florida, a pilot one month younger was testing a vastly larger airliner at St. Petersburg, Russia. This prodigy was early aviator and brilliant designer Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky. His imagining of flight’s future had the train for its paradigm, not the motorboat.
Sikorsky found willing believers in this vision at his place of employment because the Russo-Baltic Carriage Factory specialized in railcar manufacture. Directed to a new task by Sikorsky in 1913, the factory’s skilled workforce proudly built and rolled out the astonishing Ilya Muromets, whose record flight between St. Petersburg and Kiev is described in an earlier chapter.
Although designed as an airliner, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets of 1913 was produced as a bomber during World War I.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The Ilya Muromets had lavish appointments. Heat exchangers on its exhaust pipes warmed the cabin, and a wind-driven generator provided electric lighting. Reflecting its proposed role as an airliner, the plane had a fully enclosed cockpit with dual controls. A door separated it from a small passenger salon with wicker chairs and picture windows.
At this compartment’s rear