End of airmail
Post is no longer flying letters through Germany
March 28, 2024, 1:24 a.m
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The post no longer has to be as fast, but it does have to be more climate-friendly: From now on, letters within Germany will no longer be transported by plane. The last airmail planes take off at night.
After more than 62 years, Deutsche Post has stopped its domestic letter delivery flights. Early in the morning the last plane took off from Berlin and flew to Stuttgart. Shortly before, planes had taken off from Hanover, Munich and Stuttgart. The six planes had only loaded letters – a total of around 1.5 million items that weighed 53 tons. This corresponds to around three percent of the volume of letters transported by the post office in Germany every day.
In the future, the postal service will forego letter transport aircraft in order to save costs and have a better climate footprint. According to the company, CO2 emissions per letter on overland routes fall by a good 80 percent if only trucks and freight trains are used.
The company relied on flights for decades because it was under legal time pressure when it came to transporting letters: 80 percent of the letters had to reach the recipient on the next working day. However, this requirement will most likely be weakened by ongoing legal reform, which is why the Swiss Post no longer needs the flights. Night flights to transport letters began in September 1961 and reached their highest volume in 1996 with an average of 430 tons in 45 flights per night. In view of digitalization, letters then became less important, demand fell and the number of letter flights was gradually reduced.