Us Airmail

At approximately 11:30 a.m. on May 15, 1918, the U.S. Post Office inaugurated regular airmail service, using Curtiss JN-4H biplanes to fly between Washington, D.C. and New York City, with a stop in Philadelphia. It took two more years of dogged effort and experimentation, marred by dozens of crashes and 16 fatalities, for the service to fly the mail all the way across the country.

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By 1927, the Post Office had nursed the airmail service through its infancy and was ready to hand it off to private companies, like Boeing Air Transport and National Air Transport, which eventually developed into United Airlines. With aircraft like the Boeing 40C and Stearman Speedmail, and with pilots like Charles Lindbergh, contract mail carriers laid the foundation for the most expansive national air transportation system in the world.​

Us Airmail Forever Stamps

1. Airmail: A Brief History The air mail route is the first step toward the universal commercial use of the aeroplane. Lipsner, Superintendent of Aerial Mail Service, 19181 When airmail began in 1918, airplanes were still a fairly new invention. Pilots flew in open cockpits in all kinds of weather, in planes later described as “a.
2. Airmail route, 1918 The first regularly scheduled airmail route connected New York and Washington, D.C., via Philadephia, from May 15, 1918, to May 31, 1921. The Post Office Department operated the 218-mile route to demonstrate that mail transportation by airplane was possible on a regular schedule in all kinds of weather.
3. Airmail M-Bag ® packaging is the most affordable way to send large amounts of printed material internationally, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, sheet music, catalogs, directories, commercial advertising, and promotional matter. Delivery varies.
4. Air Mail is a mobile-first digital weekly that unfolds like the better weekend editions of your favorite newspapers. Air Mail is delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Saturday at 6:00 AM.

Airmail stamps pay the postage for the airmail service and were first issued in 1918.

Us Airmail Tracking

As the U.S. Postal Service celebrates the centennial with a new Forever stamp, we dug into our archive to showcase stories on the dramatic early days of airmail service, which transformed aviation almost as much as it did communications.

Photo: Loading mail sacks onto an airplane near Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1920s. (Smithsonian Institution)

At approximately 11:30 a.m. on May 15, 1918, the U.S. Post Office inaugurated regular airmail service, using Curtiss JN-4H biplanes to fly between Washington, D.C. and New York City, with a stop in Philadelphia. It took two more years of dogged effort and experimentation, marred by dozens of crashes and 16 fatalities, for the service to fly the mail all the way across the country.

Related Content

By 1927, the Post Office had nursed the airmail service through its infancy and was ready to hand it off to private companies, like Boeing Air Transport and National Air Transport, which eventually developed into United Airlines. With aircraft like the Boeing 40C and Stearman Speedmail, and with pilots like Charles Lindbergh, contract mail carriers laid the foundation for the most expansive national air transportation system in the world.​

As the U.S. Postal Service celebrates the centennial with a new Forever stamp, we dug into our archive to showcase stories on the dramatic early days of airmail service, which transformed aviation almost as much as it did communications.

Photo: Loading mail sacks onto an airplane near Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1920s. (Smithsonian Institution)

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