Berlin Tegel Airport mid- to late 1960s' introduction by Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and British European Airways (BEA) of jet aircraft with short-field capabilities that were not payload-restricted on Tempelhof's short runways, Air France experienced a traffic decline on those routes where it competed with Pan Am and BEA, mainly as a result of Tegel's greater distance and poorer accessibility from West Berlin's city centre. Over this period, the French airline's market share halved from 9% to less than 5% despite having withdrawn from Tegel–Düsseldorf in summer 1964 and concentrated its limited resources on Tegel–Frankfurt and Tegel–Munich to maximise the competitive
Berlin Tegel Airport million. This included Pan Am's internal German traffic rights as well as its gates and slots at Tegel. 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. However, Pan Am