Originally Posted by
bean
. Since IGS's were totally Berlin focussed.
Looking at Pan Am 727 schedules from the 1970s-80s it appears that Frankfurt contributed several early morning starts each day, unlike the other outstations with one, or none. Frankfurt was the 727s maintenance base in Europe. Furthermore, getting into the 1980s Pan Am started to develop quite a range of feeder flight 727s from Transatlantic 747s at Frankfurt to various other European secondary points. So my hunch would be there were crews based at both, and likewise there was a mixture of crew tenure, both 3-month visits from the USA and longer term residents. Would be likely that some had met partners while operating in Germany, and settled down there.
The corridor operations were rejigged around 1968, which dropped some, though not all, of the competitive element. Air France gave up, and pooled with BEA, the One-Elevens getting a revised bland livery with little mention of the airline name, just titled "Super One-Eleven". The two main carriers did a bit of route swapping on the low frequency destinations, and each had one main high-frequency trunk route from Berlin, Frankfurt for Pan Am and Hanover for BEA. This was co-ordinated by the West German authorities, who bankrolled the whole operation to an extent.
I was in Berlin two years ago, just before Lockdown, and having a few spare hours went out to look at Tempelhof. The classic late-30s era vast terminal building is still there, immaculately preserved on the outside, Didn't get inside, it seems to have dropped to some residual offices use. I last used it in the 1990s, Conti-Flug BAe146 from London City straight there. What a shame it didn't continue operations.