The mix of passengers depends on the destinations: groups of fishermen and some couples headed to Walker’s Cay and Bimini more couples, families, and a number of business people headed to Atlantis, the resort complex on Paradise Island. It’s not uncommon for the room to hold two flights’ worth of passengers at once, but even at capacity, the crowd wouldn’t fill the last nine rows of a 737. Then it’s on to a cinderblock waiting room.

On a recent trip, the only visible exceptions were cameras, purses, a tape recorder, and a lined writing tablet, and the last two probably apply only if you are doing a story on the airline. All baggage is checked through to the hold almost no carry-on is permitted. At the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Chalk’s passengers start their trips downstairs, at a tiny, dimly lit ticket counter. It is, according to no less an authority than the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s oldest continuously operating airline.Īugust 2002. In 1919, the operation, by then named Chalk’s Flying Service, inaugurated a regular schedule to Bimini, a Bahamian island 50 miles off the southern Florida coast.Įighty-three years later, the business, now called Chalk’s Ocean Airways, is still flying passengers in seaplanes back and forth between Florida and the Bahamas. Because neither Miami nor the Bahamian islands he frequently flew to had airports, Chalk equipped his three-seat Stinson Voyager with floats so that he could take off and land the aircraft on water. His office was a small table under a beach umbrella, and his reservation system was a single crank telephone hanging from a pole. Initially making a living as a barnstormer, in 1917 he founded the Red Arrow Flying Service, on the dock of the Royal Palm Hotel in Miami.

Chalk must have been inspired by Janus’ example he moved south as well. He and Chalk struck an agreement: Chalk would fix the engine in return, Janus would teach the young man how to fly.Ī few years later, Janus migrated to Miami and, operating a Benoist flying boat, started the nation’s first scheduled passenger air service, the St.Petersburg-Tampa Airboat. Janus’ aircraft had developed engine trouble. In 1911, Chalk, 23, was working there as a mechanic when a barnstormer and seaplane flier named Tony Janus came to town. ARTHUR BURNS CHALK'S CAREER IN SEAPLANE FLYING BEGAN IN THE UNLIKELY SETTING of Paducah, Kentucky.

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