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Last mail flight before takeoff at Berlin Brandenburg Airport
Photo: Soeren Stache / dpa
After more than 62 years, Deutsche Post has stopped sending letters by plane within Germany. On Thursday night, the last plane took off from Berlin shortly after midnight and flew to Stuttgart. Shortly before, planes had taken off again from Hanover, Munich and Stuttgart. A total of around 1.5 million letters weighing 53 tons were on board the six machines. This corresponds to around three percent of the volume of letters that were recently transported by the post office in Germany every day.
The Swiss Post will no longer use transport aircraft in order to reduce costs and CO₂ emissions. “We are ending the era of overnight letter flights with a laughing and a crying eye,” said the responsible postal manager Marc Hitschfeld. "On the one hand, the transport of letters by plane within Germany can no longer be justified in times of climate change, also because there is no longer the same urgency with letters as there was decades ago." In this respect, the end of German airmail is good news for the environment says Hitschfeld. On the other hand, a piece of postal history has just come to an end.
The so-called night airmail network officially went into operation on September 1, 1961. In 1996 there were 26 aircraft flying to 45 destinations; at that time Frankfurt still served as a hub. Letters weighing an average of 430 tons each were transported five nights a week.
Post will be allowed to deliver letters soon later
After that, the demand for letters fell significantly, and the number of flights was gradually reduced. Lufthansa exited the business in 2008, and recently only four aircraft from TUIfly and two from Eurowings were still flying. They were normal passenger planes that were filled with yellow mail boxes to transport letters. The containers went into the belly of the plane, on the seats and in the hand luggage storage space. Only letters were loaded and no parcels.
The post office is still legally obliged to deliver 80 percent of the letters posted to the recipient on the next working day. The postal law is currently being comprehensively reformed. Although the amendment has not yet been passed, there is political consensus to ease the time pressure on the postal service. Therefore, the company no longer needs domestic flights. However, the post office will not be able to do its mail business entirely without airplanes in the future: the company will continue to rely on airmail to some extent when writing abroad. These small quantities are carried as additional cargo in the belly of regular passenger aircraft.
fdi/dpa-AFX