How it started
1978–1990: American charter airline in West Berlin
Originally registered as Air Berlin USA, the company was founded in 1978 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Lelco, an American agricultural enterprise headquartered in Oregon, to operate charter flights on behalf of German tour operators from Berlin Tegel Airport, mostly to Mediterranean holiday resorts.
Kim Lundgren, a former Berlin-based flight engineer of Pan American World Airways;
John MacDonald, a former station manager of United States supplemental air carrier Saturn Airways at Berlin Tempelhof Airport in the 1960s and subsequent general manager Europe and vice president at the Berlin Tegel Airport base of the former United States supplemental carrier and charter airline Modern Air from 1968 until 1974;
Mort Beyer, Modern Air's executive vice president from 1967 until 1971 as well as the airline's president and vice president of the National Air Carrier Association in 1971 and founder of United States aviation consultancy Avmark.
Lelco was the agriculture business of Kim Lundgren's family in the United States.
From Wikipedia’s article on Air Berlin, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2