An unofficial airmail flight was conducted by Fred Wiseman, who carried three letters between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, California, on February 17, 1911. Starting in 1903 the introduction of the aeroplane generated immediate interest in using them for mail transport. Balloon mail was also carried on an 1877 flight in Nashville, Tennessee.
īalloons also carried mail out of Paris and Metz during the Franco-Prussian War (1870), drifting over the heads of the Germans besieging those cities. Postal Service issued a 7 cent stamp commemorating the event. Weather issues forced him to land near Crawfordsville, Indiana, and the mail reached its final destination via train. The first official air mail delivery in the United States took place on August 17, 1859, when John Wise piloted a balloon starting in Lafayette, Indiana, with a destination of New York. ĭuring the first aerial flight in North America by balloon on January 9, 1793, from Philadelphia to Deptford, New Jersey, Jean-Pierre Blanchard carried a personal letter from George Washington to be delivered to the owner of whatever property Blanchard happened to land on, making the flight the first delivery of air mail in the United States. The letter was written by an American Loyalist William Franklin to his son William Temple Franklin who was serving in a diplomatic role in Paris with his grandfather Benjamin Franklin. It was flown by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries. Specific instances of a letter being delivered by air long predate the introduction of Airmail as a regularly scheduled service available to the general public.Īlthough homing pigeons had long been used to send messages (an activity known as pigeon mail), the first mail to be carried by an air vehicle was on January 7, 1785, on a hot air balloon flight from Dover to France near Calais. History Early airmails Study for The First Official Airmail Flight (1941), mural by Dorothea Mierisch at the post office in McLeansboro, Illinois Such "air-speeded" mail is different from nominal airmail in its branding, price, and priority of service. Thus even "regular" mail may make part of its journey on an aircraft.
Today it is often the case that mail service is categorized and sold according to transit time alone, with mode of transport (land, sea, air) being decided on the back end in dynamic intermodal combinations. Since the official language of the Universal Postal Union is French, airmail items worldwide are often marked Par avion, literally: "by airplane".įor about the first half century of its existence, transportation of mail via aircraft was usually categorized and sold as a separate service (airmail) from surface mail. The Universal Postal Union adopted comprehensive rules for airmail at its 1929 Postal Union Congress in London.
Airmail may be the only option for sending mail to some destinations, such as overseas, if the mail cannot wait the time it would take to arrive by ship, sometimes weeks. Airmail items typically arrive more quickly than surface mail, and usually cost more to send. JSTOR ( February 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Īirmail instructional mark on a parcel from Kyrgyzstan 1912 German airmail between Bork and Brück A cover carried on a 1932 first flight in the north woods of Canada, with a cachet and franked with both a regular and an airmail stampĪirmail (or air mail) is a mail transport service branded and sold on the basis of at least one leg of its journey being by air.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
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