From the excellent Century of Flight website, a treasure trove for us airplane-lovers:
In
the history of civil aviation, Germany may hold a unique
distinction—that
of having an airship service as its first airline, considered also
by many
as the world's first passenger airline. On November 16, 1909,
German
entrepreneurs created a company named DELAG (Deutsche
Luftschiffahrt
Aktien Gesellschaft). The company used one of the large airships
built by
Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, a retired military officer in his
sixties.
The early DELAG flights, between 1910 and 1914, and then after
World War
I, between 1919 and 1921, cost passengers between 100 and 200
reichsmarks,
much more than the income of an average German worker. For the
most part,
DELAG airships carried wealthy foreigners across Germany to cities
such as
Berlin, Potsdam, and Dusseldorf.
Even though airships offered the first air transport services in
Germany,
their importance was slowly eclipsed by airplane service. In the
late
1930s, after a series of spectacular accidents involving a number
of
airships—including the catastrophic explosion of the Hindenburg
airship in May 1937—the Germans permanently discontinued airship
transport
in favour of airplanes.
