An airmail stamp is a

postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the fa ...

intended to pay either an

airmail Airmail (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. Airmail items typically arrive more quickly than surface mail, and usually cost more to send. Airmail may be the ...

fee that is charged in addition to the surface rate, or the full airmail rate, for an item of

mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...

to be transported by air. Airmail stamps should not be confused with

airmail etiquette An airmail etiquette, often shortened to just etiquette, is a label used to indicate that a letter is to be sent by airmail. Etymology The term "airmail etiquette" derived from the French word ' ("label, sticker"), from which is also derived t ...

s, which are affixed to mail as an instruction to the postal authority that the mail should be transmitted by air.

Development

History

With aviation developments, several countries started to experiment with flights, and postal authorities considered flying the mails. Initially flights were unofficial, but some flights such as the 1877 Buffalo balloon flight, carried mail, to which stamp-like labels were affixed. At the beginning airmail letters cost more than surface mail. Both airmail stamps and stamps surcharged for airmail were issued, though some countries restricted the use of airmail stamps only to letters sent by airmail, while others allowed them to be used for other mail services.Hornung (1970), pps. 94–95 NZ-UK 1935 FFC rated 2shilling4d

The first stamp depicting an aeroplane was a US 20-cent parcel post stamp issued on 1 January 1913 but not intended for airmail duty: the set of 12 showed transportation and delivery methods. Four years later an airmail stamp was issued in Italy. Several of the early ones were produced by surcharging other stamps with overprints; at first in 1917, Italy used express stamps; regular stamps were used by Austria in 1918, Sweden used official stamps in 1920. Some other examples are the use of fiscal stamps,

telegraph stamp Telegraph stamps are stamps intended solely for the prepayment of telegraph fees. The customer completed a telegraph form before handing it with payment to the clerk who applied a telegraph stamp and cancelled it to show that payment had bee ...

s, postage due stamps, and

parcel stamp In philately a parcel stamp is a stamp specifically issued to pay the fee for the transport of a parcel through the postal system and usually marked as such. It is to be distinguished from a postage stamp used to pay the cost of posting a pa ...

s by other countries. Airmail stamps have been issued for extra services, such as registered airmail, express airmail, airmail fieldpost, and even with welfare surcharges.

A new branch of collecting

In the 1920s and 1930s, when many countries issued airmail stamps to publicise their new airmail routes, a new branch of

stamp collecting Stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects. It is an area of philately, which is the study (or combined study and collection) of stamps. It has been one of the world's most popular hobbies since the late nineteenth ...

started. This led to an expansion that includes the collection of covers, and other postal items carried by aircraft. Airmail items from the early days are expensive due to the popularity of this collecting area.Hornung (1970), pp. 258 Specialised catalogues and

albums An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records coll ...

are produced for collectors of airmail stamps and other aerophilatelic items.Hornung (1970), pp. 262 Many airmail stamps feature aviation themes that are an area of

topical stamp collecting Topical or thematic stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps relating to a particular subject or concept. Topics can be almost anything, from stamps on stamps, birds, trains and poets on stamps, to famous physicians and scientists, al ...

Airmail stamp

First airmail stamps

US Airmail inverted Jenny 24c 1918 issue

The first postage stamp to be issued for an airmail flight was in May 1917 when Poste italiane

overprint An overprint is an additional layer of text or graphics added to the face of a postage or revenue stamp, postal stationery, banknote or ticket after it has been printed. Post offices most often use overprints for internal administrative pur ...

ed their existing special delivery stamps. The following year, the

United States Post Office Department The United States Post Office Department (USPOD; also known as the Post Office or U.S. Mail) was the predecessor of the United States Postal Service, in the form of a Cabinet department, officially from 1872 to 1971. It was headed by the postmas ...

issued the first airmail stamp specifically issued for the purpose; while it does not have "airmail" or "air post" printed on it, it illustrates a

Curtiss JN-4 The Curtiss JN "Jenny" was a series of biplanes built by the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York, later the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Although the Curtiss JN series was originally produced as a training aircraft for th ...

airplane An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller, or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad spe ...

. One pane of 100 stamps were found to have an

invert error In philately, an invert error occurs when part of a stamp is printed upside-down. Inverts are perhaps the most spectacular of postage stamp errors, not only because of their striking visual appearance, but because some are quite rare, and highly ...

, known as the

Inverted Jenny The Inverted Jenny (also known as an Upside Down Jenny, Jenny Invert) is a 24 cent United States postage stamp first issued on May 10, 1918, in which the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design is printed upside-down; it is ...

, because the airplane image in the centre is inverted relative to the outer frame. The error is one of the most well known airmail stamps. Several countries, such as Germany, Finland, Russia and the United States, issued special airmail stamps, or overprinted stamps, for the Zeppelin flights that took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Local airmail stamp issues

Semi-official airmail stamps are not issued by the postal authority but have official sanction and are sometimes used for

local post A local post is a mail service that operates only within a limited geographical area, typically a city or a single transportation route. Historically, some local posts have been operated by governments, while others, known as private local p ...

s, they are more accurately referred to a labels rather than stamps. For example, as noted above the privately produced 5¢ Buffalo balloon stamps were used on June 18, 1877, for a balloon flight from

Nashville Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and the ...

to Gallatin, Tennessee. The

Vin Fiz Flyer The ''Vin Fiz Flyer'' was an early Wright Brothers Model EX pusher biplane that in 1911 became the first aircraft to fly coast-to-coast across the U.S., a journey that took almost three months. History The publisher William Randolph Hearst ha ...

, an early airplane, also carried semi-official stamps on its 1911 flight across the United States.The Vin Fiz Flyer Semi-official Air Post Stamp
/ref>

References and sources

Notes Sources * * Further reading * * *

External links

Buffalo balloon stamp on cover

American Air Mail Society The American Air Mail Society (AAMS) is a U.S. nonprofit organization devoted to the collecting and study of airmail and aerophilately. History The society was founded in 1923 and is the second-oldest aerophilatelic society in the world. The Aero ...

U.S. Air Mail Stamps

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