United States airmail service
United States airmail was a service class of the United States Post Office Department and its successor United States Postal Service delivering air mail by aircraft flown within the United States and its possessions and territories. Letters and parcels intended for air mail service were marked as "Via Air Mail", appropriately franked, and assigned to any then existing class or sub-class of the Air Mail service.
After an intermittent series of government sponsored experimental flights between 1911 and 1918, domestic U.S. Air Mail was formally established as a new class of service by the Post Office Department on May 15, 1918, with the inauguration of the Washington–Philadelphia–New York route for which the first of special Air Mail stamps were issued.
The exclusive transportation of flown mail by government-operated aircraft came to an end in 1926 under the provisions of the Air Mail Act of 1925, better known as the Kelly Act. which required the USPOD to transition to contracting with commercial air carriers to fly them over Contract Air Mail routes to be established by the department, although during the first half of 1934 the United States Army Air Corps temporarily took over the routes—with disastrous results—when all CAM contracts were summarily canceled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt owing to the Air Mail scandal. Domestic air mail became obsolete in 1975 as a distinct extra fee service, and international air mail in 1995, when the USPS began transporting all First Class long-distance intercity mail by air on a routine basis.
Experimental airmails
During the first aerial flight in North America by balloon on January 9, 1793, from Philadelphia to Deptford Township, 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.John Wise piloted an unofficial balloon post flight that took place on July 17, 1859, from St. Louis, Missouri, to Henderson, New York, a distance of 1,290 km on which he carried a mailbag entrusted to him by the American Express Company. One month later, on August 17, Wise flew from Lafayette, Indiana, to Crawfordsville, Indiana, and carried 123 letters and 23 circulars on board that had been collected by the postmaster Thomas Wood and endorsed "PREPAID" but only one of these historic postal covers was discovered in 1957. In 1959 the United States Postal Service issued a 7-cent stamp commemorating Wise's flight in the Jupiter. Balloon mail was also carried on a June 1877 flight at Nashville, Tennessee.
USPOD sponsored experiments
The first official experiment at flying air mail to be made under the aegis of the United States Post Office Department took place on September 23, 1911, on the first day of an International Air Meet sponsored by The Nassau Aviation Corporation of Long Island, when pilot Earle L. Ovington flew 640 letters and 1,280 postcards from the Aero Club of New York's airfield located on Nassau Boulevard near Stratford School in Garden City, New York, to the nearby Mineola Post Office in Mineola, located less than six miles away. After being duly sworn in by U.S. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock as the first U.S. air mail pilot in history, Ovington took off in his own American-made Bleriot Queen tractor-type monoplane, Dragonfly, at 5:26 PM and dropped the bag of mail over Mineola six minutes later from an altitude of 500 feet. Unfortunately the bag broke when it hit the ground, but all of the mail was eventually recovered and forwarded by regular channels with the cancellation reading "AEROPLANE STATION No.1 – GARDEN CITY ESTATES, N.Y." Emphasizing the concept, in 1912 the United States printed a 20-cent stamp in the Parcel Post series showing a flying machine and titled, "AEROPLANE CARRYING MAIL". The mailbag behind the pilot is labeled "No. 1".The first experimental foreign air mail flight from the U.S. was made by Eddie Hubbard and William E. Boeing while on a survey flight to Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 3, 1919. On board with them was a mail bag containing 60 letters, making this the first international U.S. Air Mail flight. Their aircraft was a modified World War I Boeing Model C trainer which had a cruising speed of 65 mph. Hubbard later flew the first international contract mail route, from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, which began on October 15, 1920. The route was created to connect with steamships going to Asia.
Scheduled airmails
U.S. Government flown air mail
On February 18, 1911, Fred Wiseman transported two letters to Santa Rosa, California Postmaster H.l. Tripp from Petaluma, California Postmaster John Olmsted. When the letters arrived, Fred became the pilot who carried the first airmail sanctioned by a U.S. postal authority.The first scheduled US airmail service connected Washington, D.C., and New York. This 218-mile route was designed by Augustus Post, the Secretary of the Aero Club of America, who had served as an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association in 1908 and was newly returned from special military service training aviators in Britain and France. The route was the first step in establishing a transcontinental route by air. Transcontinental air service was the best opportunity for airmail to provide faster service at lower cost than the existing railroads. Routes like College Park, Maryland to New York were only slightly faster than the railroad, but were a good laboratory for developing safe and reliable airmail operations.
Throughout the airmail's planning, the US was preparing to fight World War I and this exposed deep flaws in American airpower including obsolete aircraft and too few pilots, both in quality and quantity. As a result, Post Office and military officials believed airmail could increase the speed of communication while also improving military pilots. By flying the mail, novice pilots would develop their long-distance flying skills including aerial navigation.
The first scheduled U.S. Air Mail service began on May 15, 1918, using six converted United States Army Air Service Curtiss JN-4HM "Jenny" biplanes flown by Army pilots under the command of Major Reuben H. Fleet and operating on a route between Washington, D.C. and New York City with an intermediate stop in Philadelphia. Among those who were on hand for the departure of the first flight from Washington, D.C., were President Woodrow Wilson, U.S. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Army 2nd Lt. George L. Boyle was selected to pilot aircraft #38262 on the first northbound flight which, unfortunately, turned out to be a somewhat less than successful initial venture.
Almost immediately after taking off at 11:47 AM, Boyle became disoriented and started flying South when he followed the wrong set of railroad tracks out of the city. Realizing that he was lost, Boyle attempted to find out where he was by making an unscheduled landing just 18 minutes later at 12:05 PM in Waldorf, Maryland, about 25 miles south of the city. Unfortunately, however, he broke the prop on his airplane when he made a hard landing, so the 140 pounds of mail he was carrying had to be trucked back to Washington.
However aviators 1st Lt. Torrey H. Webb and 2nd Lt. James C. Edgerton completed the scheduled southbound relay with 144 pounds of mail, and Edgerton then flew Boyle's mail to Philadelphia the following day. The site of the first continuously scheduled air mail service is marked by a in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.. The route was extended to Boston three weeks later on June 4.
After four months of the mail being flown by the Army, all flight operations were taken over by the USPOD's Aerial Mail Service on August 12, 1918, using a fleet of six purpose built JR-1B mail biplanes designed and constructed by the Standard Aero Corporation of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and flown by civilian pilots hired by the Post Office Department. After a number of "pathfinder" flights made in September, November, and early December, the first flight providing scheduled east–west service between New York and Chicago occurred on December 17, 1918.
Flight operations moved nine miles northeast to the College Park Air Field. Already a proven airfield for training military pilots between 1909–1911 and with active civilian flight operations in 1918, it was already a functioning field requiring minimal modification for airmail operations. In fact, College Park was the preferred location when Major Rueben Fleet scouted locations for the Army airmail. However, officials chose the Polo Grounds for its proximity to the White House and Congress.
In 1919, the Post Office built a new hangar and a "compass rose" at College Park. The compass rose was a concrete compass in the ground to continuously display true north. At the time, airplane compasses needed to be calibrated before every flight. Pilots lined up their planes on the roses’ north-south directional axis to check their compass’ accuracy. This was a temporary solution until better instruments and navigation systems were developed for aircraft.
While the role of the DC-NY route was to create an organization and develop reliable operations, the long-term success in aviation both economically and velocity required it to expand across the continent. In 1921, postal officials closed the College Park airmail station to focus on routes where airmail was clearly superior in speed and cost to the railroad. However, the field remained home to researchers, inventors, and businesses focused on developing commercial aviation.