The German postal service Deutsche Post has discontinued its domestic mail flights after more than 62 years.
In the early hours of Thursday, the last aircraft carrying domestic mail took off from Berlin and flew to Stuttgart.
Shortly before that, planes had taken off from Hanover, Munich and Stuttgart. The six planes were carrying only letters - a total of around 1.5 million items weighing 53 tons.
This corresponds to around 3% of the volume of letters transported by Deutsche Post around the country every day.
In future, the postal service will no longer use letter transport aircraft in order to cut costs and improve its carbon footprint. According to the postal service, CO2 emissions per letter are reduced by about 80% when they are transported by land instead of air.
For decades, the service relied on flights as it was required by law to deliver at least 80% of posted letters on the next working day and 95% on the second working day.
A reform of Germany's Postal Act proposed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz's governing coalition relaxing requirements around delivery times has enabled Deutsche Post to cut costs and cancel night flights.
For consumers, this will mean that the average waiting time for letters will be longer than before.
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.
With services and communications increasingly shifting online, demand fell and the number of flights carrying letters had been gradually shrinking.