RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester.

Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.

Ryanair flies to Berlin. Even before the new airport, they were flying to Schoenefeld which was just outside the city limits. In fact, the old airport was just across the runaways of the new one and you can still reach the old terminal building with the commuter train. Schoenefeld was the old East Berlin airport, which was indeed suboptimal for the load of travellers it got over time.

The are going to renovate Schönefeld and make it a private airport for German politicians. I guess the project will be ready in 20-30 years...

In general, European air travel is often pretty cheap relative to trains. Varies enormously though.

A pilot friend who flew for ryanair showed me around control tower of Frankfurt Hahn (hint: nowhere near the real frankfurt) some ten years ago. We were shooting the shit with the controllers as a private jet plane came in on the radio, asking permission to land. After some back and forth they discovered this was the fake frankfurt, and eventually didn't come in for landing. That got a good chuckle from everyone...

Houston to Austin only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.

Heh, reminds me of the saying: An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

Houston to Austin seems to take 50 minutes by flight vs. 2 hours and 30 minutes by car. That's not the best convenience ratio for a domestic flight (going between the two largest cities in Denmark is 40 minutes by air vs. over 3 hours by car), and it's certainly more expensive...

However, whether it's more polluting actually depends on a lot of things. Comparing a fully booked, modern commercial passenger plane vs. a car carrying a single person usually has the airplane coming out on top (heh). A modern car with all seats occupied beats the airplane though.

(A naturally aspirated V8 without direct fuel injection leads to a divide by zero in any efficiency calculations.)

Just remember to leave early enough to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your scheduled departure time ;)

And don't forget to factor in that IAH is a 20 mile drive from downtown Houston, and AUS is another 10 miles to downtown Austin! (Combined, that's about 1/5 of the driving distance between the two cities.)

Houston <-> Austin is a business flyer route. That's why it's so expensive and you can get a flight every ~30mins or so throughout the day.

You can also fly Austin<>LA/Denver for 1/3-1/2 the cost Houston<>Austin. I've flown to Canada (from Tx) for less than a Houston/Austin (or Austin/Houston<>Dallas) flight.

These routes are where high-speed trains would excel...if one could get past the airline lobby

Austin, isn't representative of anything except a confluence of factors combined with stupidity.

First, its a ~30 min flight to Houston, and a ~40 min flight to Dallas, two of the largest and busiest hub airports in the USA. So, a massive amount of american/united Austin traffic is Austin->IAH/DFW->destination if your not flying southwest with a direct route. Yes, there are a number of direct routes to other places, particularly large hubs (DEN/ATL/JFK/etc) but its like once a day or every other day for non hub airports.

But that pattern is doubly reinforced through local decisions which have resulted in ABIA being the number #1 airport in the USA for flights per gate.

AKA, by gate count it has the highest utilization of any airport in the USA, and this is the result of the anti-growth politics for the past 40+ years, that did things like move the airport from Mueller, to ABIA while initially planning on having the same number of gates as Mueller, and only relenting and adding 4 (IIRC) more. And keep in mind that Mueller was frequently like going to a crowded standing room only bar. And not only was ABIA undersized but it wasn't designed for serious expansion. And really, there wasn't any excuse when one looks at any airport designed in the past half century its obvious where the terminal expansion is planned (ex:DFW) with the better designed airports like TPA/MCO using a hub and spoke model. Instead what Austin is going to get is an ad-hoc expansions which will result in Heathrow levels of suck (and its already that way for the south terminal, where one has to leave the airport, drive for 10 mins and then re-enter).

I wish this wasn't the case. Lack of tax on jet fuel and massive taxpayer funded subsidies for airlines is why a flight is £20 and rail is like £100. It's just ridiculous. But people like their cheap flights so they won't vote to not destroy the planet.