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 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. The Universal Postal Union adopted comprehensive rules for airmail at its 1929 Postal Union Congress in London. Since the official language of the Universal Postal Union is French, airmail items worldwide are often marked Par avion , literally: "by airplane".
34-476: For 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. 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. Thus even "regular" mail may make part of its journey on an aircraft. Such "air-speeded" mail
68-530: A die. Earle Ovington Earle Lewis Ovington (December 20, 1879 – July 21, 1936) was an American aeronautical engineer, aviator and inventor, and served as a lab assistant to Thomas Edison . Ovington piloted the first official airmail flight in the United States in a Blériot XI on September 23, 1911. He carried a sack of mail from Nassau Boulevard aerodrome , Garden City, New York , to Mineola, New York . He circled at 500 feet and tossed
102-636: A hot air balloon flight from Dover to France near Calais . It was flown by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries . 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 . During the first aerial flight in North America by balloon on January 9, 1793, from Philadelphia to Deptford, New Jersey , Jean-Pierre Blanchard carried
136-593: A house in the Samarkand area of Santa Barbara, California , which included an airstrip. While this airstrip wasn't the ultimate site of the Santa Barbara Municipal Airfield, it did serve in that capacity until Ovington's death. He died on July 21, 1936. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea. This biographical article related to aviation is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about an American inventor
170-469: A monologue by a veteran pilot, preserving the atmosphere of these pioneering times: "We used to fly on the Paris route, from Hounslow to Le Bourget and get through as best as you could. Later we moved on to Croydon . (...) We carried the much advertised Air Mails. That meant the machines had to fly whether there were passengers to be carried or not. It was left to the discretion of the pilot whether or not
204-507: 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 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 . Weather issues forced him to land near Crawfordsville, Indiana , and
238-455: A specific kind of airmail letter which is its own envelope; see aerogram . Some forms of airletter, such as aerogram , may forbid enclosure of other material so as to keep the weight down. The choice to send a letter by air is indicated either by a handwritten note on the envelope , by the use of special labels called airmail etiquettes (blue stickers with the words "air mail" in French and in
272-461: Is any component manipulated by the user. The server-side (or "backend") code usually resides on the server , often far removed physically from the user. In content management systems , the terms frontend and backend may refer to the end-user facing views of the CMS and the administrative views, respectively. In speech synthesis , the frontend refers to the part of the synthesis system that converts
306-421: Is different from nominal airmail in its branding, price, and priority of service. 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. Although 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
340-405: Is placed on the network's outward-facing frontend or boundary . Network traffic passes through the front-end hardware before entering the network. In processor design , frontend design would be the initial description of the behavior of a circuit in a hardware description language such as Verilog , while backend design would be the process of mapping that behavior to physical transistors on
374-500: Is unavailable. It is usually impossible to know this by examining an envelope, and such items are not considered "airmail." Generally, airmail would take a guaranteed and scheduled flight and arrive first, while air-speeded mail would wait for a non-guaranteed and merely available flight and would arrive later than normal airmail. A letter sent via airmail may be called an aerogramme , aerogram , air letter or simply airmail letter . However, aerogramme and aerogram may also refer to
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#1733085409519408-631: The Bombay-Calcutta line to the exhibition. The letters bore an official frank "First Aerial Post, U.P. Exhibition, Allahabad. 1911". The aircraft used was a Humber-Sommer biplane , and it made the journey in thirteen minutes. The first official American airmail delivery was made on September 23, 1911, by pilot Earle Ovington under the authority of the United States Post Office Department . The first official air mail in Australia
442-633: The London suburb of Hendon , North London , and the Postmaster General 's office in Windsor, Berkshire , on September 9, 1911, as part of the celebrations for King George V 's coronation and at the suggestion of Sir Walter Windham , who based his proposal on the successful experiment he had overseen in India. The service ran for just under a month, transporting 35 bags of mail in 16 flights; four pilots operated
476-570: The Middle East . On 25 December 1918, the Latécoère Airlines (later becoming the famed Aéropostale ) became the first civilian international airmail service, when mail was flown from Toulouse , France, to Barcelona , Spain. Less than 2 months later, on 19 February 1919, the airmail service was extended to Casablanca , Morocco, making the Latécoère Airlines the first transcontinental airmail service. In June 1919, Alcock and Brown completed
510-579: The Royal Air Force pioneered the first scheduled international airmail service between Folkestone, Kent and Cologne, Germany . The service operated between December 1918 and mid-1919; its purpose was to provide troops of the British Army stationed in Germany with a fast mail service. (see more at British Forces Post Office ) Throughout the 1920s the Royal Air Force continued to develop air routes through
544-500: The aeroplane generated immediate interest in using them for mail transport. An unofficial airmail flight was conducted by Fred Wiseman, who carried three letters between Petaluma and Santa Rosa , California, on February 17, 1911. The world's first official airmail flight came the next day, at a large exhibition in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh , British India . The organizer of the aviation display, Sir Walter Windham ,
578-463: The parser section that deals with source code and the backend that generates code and optimizes . Some designs, such as GCC , offer choices between multiple frontends (parsing different source languages ) or backends (generating code for different target processors ). Some graphical user interface (GUI) applications running in a desktop environment are implemented as a thin frontend for underlying command-line interface (CLI) programs, to save
612-587: The pilot would sign them as well. The first stamps designated specifically for airmail were issued by Italy in 1917, and used on experimental flights; they were produced by overprinting special delivery stamps. Austria also overprinted stamps for airmail in March 1918, soon followed by the first definitive stamp for airmail, issued by the United States in May 1918. A postal service may sometimes opt to transport some regular mail by air, perhaps because other transportation
646-417: The presentation layer ( frontend ), and the data access layer ( backend ) of a piece of software , or the physical infrastructure or hardware . In the client–server model , the client is usually considered the frontend and the server is usually considered the backend, even when some presentation work is actually done on the server itself. In software architecture , there may be many layers between
680-455: The aircraft including Gustav Hamel , who flew the first service in his Blériot , covering the 21 miles between Hendon and Windsor in just 18 minutes. The service was eventually terminated due to constant and severe delays caused by bad weather conditions. Similar services were intermittently run in other countries before the war , including in Germany , France and Japan , where airmail provision
714-519: The bag over the side of the cockpit and the sack burst on impact, scattering letters and postcards. He delivered 640 letters and 1,280 postcards, including a letter to himself from the United States Post Office Department designating him as "Official Air Mail Pilot #1." He was born on December 20, 1879, in Chicago, Illinois. He married Adelaide in 1911 and they had two children: Earle Kester Ovington (1912–2006) and Audrey Ovington (1914-2005) He built
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#1733085409519748-447: The case of web and mobile frontends, the API is often based on HTTP request/response. The API is sometimes designed using the "Backend for Frontend" (BFF) pattern, that serves responses to ease the processing on frontend side. In network computing , frontend can refer to any hardware that optimizes or protects network traffic . It is called application front-end hardware because it
782-455: The first transatlantic airmail flight. The first airmail service established officially by an airline occurred in Colombia , South America, on 19 October 1920. Scadta , the first airline of the country, flew landing river by river delivering mail in its destinations. Australia's first airmail contract was awarded to Norman (later Sir) Brearley's Western Australian Airlines (WAA). The first airmail
816-536: The flight should be cancelled in bad weather; the pilots were dead keen on flying in the most impossible conditions. Sanderson got killed this way at Douinville. And all he had in the machine was a couple of picture postcards from trippers in Paris, sent to their families as a curiosity. That was the Air Mail. No passengers or anything—just the mail". In the aftermath of the war, the Royal Engineers (Postal Section) and
850-418: The hardware and end user . The front is an abstraction, simplifying the underlying component by providing a user-friendly interface, while the back usually handles data storage and business logic . In telecommunication , the front can be considered a device or service, while the back is the infrastructure that supports provision of service. A rule of thumb is that the client-side (or "frontend")
884-404: The home language), or by the use of specially-marked envelopes. Special airmail stamps may also be available, or required; the rules vary in different countries. The study of airmail is known as aerophilately . Front and back ends In software engineering , the terms frontend and backend (sometimes written as back end or back-end ) refer to the separation of concerns between
918-482: The input text into a symbolic phonetic representation, and the backend converts the symbolic phonetic representation into actual sounds. In compilers , the frontend translates a computer programming source code into an intermediate representation , and the backend works with the intermediate representation to produce code in a computer output language. The backend usually optimizes to produce code that runs faster. The frontend/backend distinction can separate
952-567: The mail reached its final destination via train. In 1959, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 7 cent stamp commemorating the event. Balloons also carried mail out of Paris and Metz during the Franco-Prussian War (1870), drifting over the heads of the Germans besieging those cities. Balloon mail was also carried on an 1877 flight in Nashville, Tennessee . Starting in 1903 the introduction of
986-452: The user from learning the special terminology and memorizing the commands . Another way to understand the difference between the two is to understand the knowledge required of a frontend vs. a backend software developer . The list below focuses on web development as an example. Note that both positions, despite possibly working on one product, have a very distinct set of skills. The frontend communicates with backend through an API . In
1020-429: Was able to secure permission from the postmaster general in India to operate an airmail service in order to generate publicity for the exhibition and to raise money for charity. Mail from people across the region was gathered in at Holy Trinity Church and the first airmail flight was piloted by Henri Pequet , who flew 6,500 letters a distance of 13 km (8.1 mi) from Allahabad to Naini —the nearest station on
1054-649: Was briefly established in 1912, only to meet with similar practical difficulties. The range, speed and lifting capacity of aircraft were transformed through technological innovation during the war, allowing the first practical air mail services to finally become a reality when the war ended. For instance, the first regularly scheduled airmail service in the United States was inaugurated on May 15, 1918. The route, which ran between Washington, D.C. , and New York City , with an intermediate stop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ,
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1088-486: Was carried between Geraldton and Derby in Western Australia on December 5, 1921. Since stamp collecting was already a well-developed hobby by this time, collectors followed developments in airmail service closely, and went to some trouble to find out about the first flights between various destinations, and to get letters onto them. The authorities often used special cachets on the covers , and in many cases
1122-462: Was carried by French pilot Maurice Guillaux. On July 16–18, 1914, he flew his Blériot XI aircraft from Melbourne to Sydney, a distance of 584 miles (940 km), carrying 1785 specially printed postcards, some Lipton's Tea and some O.T. Lemon juice. At the time, this was the longest such flight in the world. The world's first scheduled airmail post service took place in the United Kingdom between
1156-751: Was designed by aviation pioneer Augustus Post . The field used for this service is marked by a plaque in West Potomac Park . In 1925, the U.S. Postal service issued contracts to fly airmail between designated points. By 1931, 85% of domestic airline revenue was from airmail. In Germany, dirigibles of the 1920s and 1930s were used extensively to carry airmail; it was known as Zeppelin mail , or dirigible mail. The German Zeppelins were especially visible in this role, and many countries issued special stamps for use on Zeppelin mail. The 1928 book So Disdained by Nevil Shute —a novel based on this author's deep interest in and thorough knowledge of aviation—includes
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