Tegel was home to a small detachment of the French Army Light Aviation, which used single engined Cessna O-1 Bird Dog from 1968 to 1993, and Sud-Ouest Alouette III Helicopters from May 1987 until June 1994.

In the late 1950s, the runways at West Berlin's city centre Tempelhof Airport had become too short to accommodate the new-generation jet aircraft such as the Aérospatiale Caravelle, Boeing 707, de Havilland Comet,[nb 1] and Douglas DC-8, without imposing payload or range restrictions that made commercial operations unviable.

In addition, all flightdeck crew[nb 2] flying aircraft into and out of West Berlin were required to hold American, British, or French passports.

[18] During that period, the majority of Tegel's regular commercial flights served West German domestic routes, hub airports in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Amsterdam, points in the United States, and popular holiday resorts in the Mediterranean and Canary Islands.

[20][21] On that day, Air France, which had served Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, Nuremberg, and its main base at Paris Le Bourget/Orly during the previous decade from Tempelhof with Douglas DC-4, Sud-Est Languedoc, and Lockheed Constellation/Super Constellation piston equipment, shifted its entire Berlin operation to Tegel because Tempelhof's runways were too short to permit the introduction of the Sud-Aviation Caravelle, the French flag carrier's new short-haul jet, with a viable payload.

[20][22][23][24] (Air France's Caravelle IIIs lacked thrust reversers that would have permitted them to land safely on Tempelhof's short runways with a full commercial payload.

Over this period, the French airline's market share halved from 9% to less than 5%, despite having withdrawn from Tegel–Düsseldorf in summer 1964 and concentrating its limited resources on Tegel–Frankfurt and Tegel–Munich to maximise the competitive impact on the latter two routes (Air France had already discontinued Berlin–Nuremberg services prior to its move to Tegel).

To reverse growing losses on its Berlin routes resulting from load factors as low as 30%, Air France decided to withdraw from the internal German market entirely.

This arrangement entailed BEA taking over Air France's two remaining German domestic routes to Frankfurt and Munich and operating these with its own aircraft and flightdeck crews from Tempelhof.

[22][23][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] From 1 November 1972, the daily Air France service between Orly and Tegel routed via Cologne in both directions to maintain the airline's internal German traffic rights from/to Berlin.

The additional daily service consisted of an evening inbound and early morning outbound flight, which included a night stop for both aircraft and crew in Berlin.

[52] Following the cessation of direct Tegel–New York City scheduled services, Pan Am continued to operate affinity group/Advance Booking Charter (ABC) flights from Tegel to the US on an ad hoc basis.

The first expansion in Pan Am's Berlin operation since the move to Tegel occurred during that year's Easter festival period, when the airline temporarily stationed a Boeing 707-320B at the airport to cope with the seasonal rush on the prime Berlin–Frankfurt route.

[78] British Airways was the last of West Berlin's three main scheduled carriers to commence regular operations from Tegel following the move from Tempelhof on 1 September 1975.

This traffic redistribution between West Berlin's two commercial airports was intended to alleviate Tempelhof's increasing congestion and to make better use of Tegel, which was underutilised at the time.

[19] During that period, the Allied charter carriers had begun replacing their obsolete propliners with contemporary turboprop and jet aircraft types, which suffered payload and range restrictions on Tempelhof's short runways.

This was the reason charter carriers favoured Tegel despite being less popular than Tempelhof because of its greater distance from West Berlin's city centre and poor public transport links.

[19] Following the transfer of all charter traffic to Tegel, British Eagle, Dan-Air Services, Invicta International Airlines, Laker Airways and Modern Air Transport began stationing several of their jets at the airport.

[19][89][90] While British Eagle's and Invicta's presence at Tegel lasted only for the 1968 summer season, Dan-Air, Laker Airways, and Modern Air were present at the airport for a number of years.

[91][92] Channel Airways's collapse in early 1972 provided the impetus for Dan-Air to take over the failed carrier's charter contracts and to expand its own operations at Tegel.

Euroberlin was jointly owned by Air France and Lufthansa, with the former holding a 51% majority stake, thereby making it a French legal entity and enabling it to conduct commercial airline operations in West Berlin.

During that period, the airport scene at Berlin Tegel could be very colourful, with Air France Caravelles, the UK independents' BAC One-Elevens, de Havilland Comets, and Hawker Siddeley Tridents as well as the US supplementals' Boeing 707s, Convair Coronados and Douglas DC-8s congregating on its ramp.

This coincided with the lengthening of the runways to permit fully laden widebodied aircraft to take off and land without restricting their range and construction of a motorway and access road linking the new terminal to the city centre.

This agreement, under which Lufthansa contracted up to seven of Pan Am's Tegel-based Boeing 727-200s operated by that airline's flightdeck and cabin crews to ply its scheduled routes to Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart until mid-1991, also facilitated Pan Am's orderly exit from the internal German air transport market after 40 years' uninterrupted service as European Union (EU) legislation prevented it from participating in the internal air transport market of the EU/European Economic Area (EEA) as a non-EU/EEA headquartered carrier.

It was also driven by its own corporate restructuring, which aimed to refocus the airline as a Gatwick-based short-haul "mainline" scheduled operator and involved phasing out its smaller aircraft and thinner routes.

[137][138][139] On 9 October 2017, Air Berlin announced termination of all of its own operations, excluding wet leases, by the end of the month,[140] leading to the loss of the airport's largest customer.

On 28 October 2017, easyJet announced it would take over some of bankrupt Air Berlin's former assets at Tegel Airport to gradually start its own base operations there on 7 January 2018.

Due to legal and safety reasons, Tegel had been held operational for air traffic for another six months without handling any scheduled services before being decommissioned as an aviation facility.

This housing in Tegel, run by non-governmental organizations, like the German Red Cross, costs the state of Berlin 200 Euros per day per single individual, mounting to 30 Million per month.

Despite the size and importance of Berlin as one of Europe's largest capital cities, Tegel handled only eight long-haul routes prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,[160] several of them seasonal — most notably by Qatar Airways to Doha, United Airlines to Newark and Scoot to Singapore.