Northeast Airlines (later acquired by Delta Airlines) inaugurated Convair 880 service from Jacksonville to Miami on April 30, 1961.
This cover was carried on the inaugural Convair 880 flight from Jacksonville, Florida to Miami, Florida (where it was backstamped) and is listed in The Jet Age Flights Section of The American Air Mail Catalogue as J-820.
The Convair 880 is an American narrow-body jet airliner produced by the Convair division of General Dynamics. It was designed to compete with the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 by being smaller but faster, a niche that failed to create demand. When it was first introduced, some aviation circles claimed that at 615 mph (990 km/h), it was the fastest jet transport in the world. Only 65 Convair 880s were produced over the lifetime of the production run from 1959 to 1962, and General Dynamics eventually withdrew from the airliner market after considering the 880 project a failure.