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Albert Whitted Airport is a city-owned general aviation field on the downtown St Petersburg waterfront in Pinellas County, Florida, celebrated as the birthplace of scheduled airline flight. It offers pilots a scenic, waterside approach over Tampa Bay with two lit hard-surfaced runways and a control tower, all within a few miles of downtown St Petersburg.
Albert Whitted Airport is a public, city-owned general aviation airport occupying a compact 110-acre site on the edge of Tampa Bay, immediately southeast of downtown St Petersburg, Florida. It has no scheduled airline service and is used almost entirely by general aviation, flight training, air taxi and medical transport operators, but it carries an outsized place in aviation history as the site associated with the world's first scheduled airline flight, making it a notable stop for any sim pilot exploring Florida's Gulf coast.
The airport sits on the west edge of Tampa Bay, just southeast of downtown St Petersburg and east of the University of South Florida St Petersburg campus. It is served by a control tower, with approach and departure handled by Tampa Approach/Departure on 119.65 MHz, placing it within controlled airspace associated with the wider Tampa Bay terminal area.
The airport has two paved runways. Runway 07/25 is a hard-surfaced, lit runway of roughly 3,415 feet in length. Runway 18/36 is a hard-surfaced, lit runway of 2,867 feet in length. There is no ILS at the field, and the airport lies at an elevation of 3 feet above sea level.
The airport is served by a control tower. Tower and CTAF operate on 127.4 MHz, ground control on 121.8 MHz, and UNICOM is available on 122.95 MHz. The ASOS broadcasts on 118.875 MHz, and Tampa Approach/Departure can be contacted on 119.65 MHz for arrivals and departures. There is no instrument landing system at the airport.
As a tower-controlled field, arriving and departing traffic should expect to work the tower on 127.4 MHz, with ground movements coordinated on 121.8 MHz. Pilots flying unmanned aircraft are required to obtain prior authorisation before operating within five miles of the airport, an area that covers the entire downtown St Petersburg waterfront.
The airport's waterfront position on Tampa Bay makes it readily identifiable from the air, bordered by the downtown St Petersburg skyline to the northwest and the University of South Florida St Petersburg campus to the west. Albert Whitted Park lies immediately to the north of the airfield, forming part of the city's waterfront park system and a useful visual marker when approaching from over the bay.
St Petersburg is recognised as the birthplace of scheduled commercial airline flight: on 1 January 1914 a Benoist XIV flying boat operated by the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, piloted by Tony Jannus and carrying passenger A. C. Pheil, a former St Petersburg mayor, took off from the city's downtown yacht basin on the first scheduled commercial aircraft flight in history. Construction of the airport itself began in October 1928 and it opened in the summer of 1929, having previously been known as the Cook-Springstead tracks before being renamed Albert Whitted Airport on 12 October 1928 in honour of Lieutenant James Albert Whitted, USNR, a St Petersburg native and one of the US Navy's first 250 Naval Aviators. Whitted, who had served as chief instructor of advanced flying at NAS Pensacola, returned home after active duty and introduced local people to flying in an aircraft he designed and built called the Bluebird, later also building the Falcon; he was killed in 1923 in a flying accident near Pensacola when the Falcon's propeller broke off. National Airlines began service from the airport in 1934 before relocating to St Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport by the end of the Second World War; National later merged with Pan American World Airways. In 1929 the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company based one of its airships at Albert Whitted, making it one of the first airports to host a Goodyear blimp. Between 1934 and 1935 the Public Works Administration built what became Coast Guard Air Station St Petersburg in the airfield's southeast corner; during the early years of the Second World War its aircraft flew anti-submarine patrols against German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico before turning to search and rescue work, operating types including the Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina, Martin PBM Mariner, and later the P5M Marlin and HU-16 Albatross, with helicopters and eventually HH-3Fs joining the inventory by the 1970s. The Coast Guard's need for larger, land-based HC-130 Hercules aircraft in 1976 could not be accommodated by Albert Whitted's short runways, prompting the Coast Guard's move to a newly built Air Station Clearwater; the St Petersburg station was converted to a non-flying installation. During the Second World War the airport also served as a primary flight training base for the US Navy and US Marine Corps, with hundreds of Naval Aviation cadets under the V-5 pre-commissioning program training in Stearman N2S and Waco biplanes before civilian activity resumed after the war.
Albert Whitted Airport today functions purely as a general aviation field with no scheduled commercial airline service, supporting flight training, air taxi operations, Civil Air Patrol activity, and medical transport flights including Bayflite Medivac and services linked to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital. Flight training is available through operators such as St Pete Air and independent instructors based at the field, and Sheltair operates an FBO on the airfield offering fuel and ground handling for visiting aircraft. The Albert Whitted Airport Preservation Society and the Friends of Albert Whitted Airport both maintain a presence at the field, running an education centre, the National Airlines Museum, airport tours, and youth aviation programmes.
