DELAG

"DELAG, acronym for Deutsche Luftschifffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft (German for "German Airship Travel Corporation"), was the world's first airline to use an aircraft in revenue service. It operated a fleet of zeppelin rigid airships manufactured by the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin Corporation. Its headquarters were located in Frankfurt, Germany.

DELAG was founded on 16 November 1909 as a commercial passenger-carrying offshoot of Zeppelin Luftschiffbau. While the notion did not have the support of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the inventor of the zeppelin, Alfred Colsman, the business manager of Zeppelin Luftschiffbau, gained both funding and promotion for passenger flights from Albert Ballin, the head of the Hamburg America Line. On 19 June 1910, DELAG's first zeppelin, designated LZ 7 and named Deutschland, performed its first flight. Despite its loss on 28 June 1910, the company launched the improved Deutschland II and the LZ 10 Schwaben during the following year. It carried 1,553 paying passengers during its commercial career. By July 1914, one month prior to the start of the First World War, DELAG's Zeppelins had transported a total of 34,028 passengers on 1,588 commercial flights; over these trips, the fleet had accumulated 172,535 kilometres across 3,176 hours of flight." - (en.wikipedia.org 11.08.2021)