The End of Domestic U.S. Air Mail As A Distinct Service
Air Mail as a distinct service was effectively ended within the United States on October 10, 1975, however, when all domestic intercity First Class mails began to be transported by air whenever practical and/or expeditious at the normal First Class rate. Domestic Air Mail as a separate class of service (and its rate structure) was formally eliminated by the successor to the Post Office Department, the United States Postal Service (USPS) on May 1, 1977.
When the USPS began to service all international First Class mails by air without additional charge in 1995 and simultaneously eliminated Surface (or "Sea") service which provided transportation by ship, it also announced that the words "Air Mail" would no longer appear on any U.S. postage stamps. While the USPS no longer offers traditional letter Air Mail, it does provide various classes of "premium" domestic and international business, priority, and express Air Mail services with guaranteed delivery times at much higher rates.
In June 2006 the USPS formally trademarked Air Mail (two words with capital first letters) along with Pony Express.
Read more about this topic: Airmails Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the words the end of, the end, domestic, air, mail, distinct and/or service:
“At the end of the row
I stepped on the toe
Of an unemployed hoe.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“This could be the day.
I could slip anchor and wander
to the end of the jetty
uncoil into the waters
a vessel of light moonglade
ride the freshets to sundown”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place.... A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.”
—Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
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—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)