Commemorating the world's first postal delivery

Today, and February 18th annually, is Airmail Day エアメールの日. On February 18th 1911 the first ever postal delivery by airplane took place in India. During an exhibition in Allahabad, a Humber‑Sommer biplane transported about 6,500 letters and postcards from the fairgrounds to the nearby town of Naini, roughly nine kilometers away. 

While this was the first airmail flight, regular scheduled airmail service began later, in 1918, when the U.S. Post Office launched a route between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. Airmail Day highlights how a brief experimental flight helped open the door to global air‑based postal networks and the faster, more connected world that followed.

It is reported that the first international airmail flight happened in the same year as that first domestic air flight in India. In Japan, international airmail there was experimental airmail routes in the 1920s and by the 1930s they had established more regular international airmail connections.