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Comment by grog454 | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder how we went from Wright brothers to commercial flight. Despite being the longest Wikipedia article I've ever seen the Wright Brother's wiki doesn't seem to cover it. Maybe it's a poorly defined question.

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I believe the answer is war. If there is a class of folks outside of "the inventor" that you can risk on an experimental aircraft, it's soldiers.

WW1 happened very quickly after the invention of the plane and there was a huge explosion in quantity and type of airplane in WW1.

I'm no historian though, there could be nuances I'm missing.

Florida man [1]. More seriously, you have to remember that this was in a time before there were a million rules, regulations, and lawsuits for everything. The first commercial airline was a man with a plane, likely largely "self built" (whatever that means in a time before aviation industrialization), who started offering flights in Florida across a peninsula. It worked, it was profitable, there was a market - commercial aviation was born.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Jannus

> The first commercial airline was a man with a plane,

The Florida Man you linked was the pilot for two other men [1], the first commercial air service was Delag operating Zepplin airships .. followed by Aero Rt in Hungary .. then followed by [1] in Florida.

I can't (right now at least) determine if Aero Rt was operating airships or airplanes ... so you may or may not be correct wrt planes at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg%E2%80%93Tampa_A...

Yeah, I'm only referring to airplanes, and Florida man was definitely the first there. But zeppelins, hot air balloons, and other methods of air transport obviously came well before airplanes.

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