PolitiFact: Austin Not the Biggest City Missing European Flights
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In this week’s Politifact: a fact check that started with a KUT News report.
Emily Donahue with KUT News spoke with Gardner Selby of the Austin American-Statesman’s PolitFact Texas team. It all started with a KUT News report on Mayor Lee Leffingwell’s push for non-stop flights from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to Europe. We quoted Austin lawyer Pete Winstead, who said Austin is the biggest city in the country without a nonstop flight to a European capital.
PolitiFact Texas started with a Census Bureau breakdown indicating that a dozen cities are more populous than Austin, starting with New York and extending to Dallas, San Jose, Jacksonville and Indianapolis. It also checked travel websites and with airport managers to see which cities had non-stops over the pond. The first find was that eight of the nine biggest cities have non-stops to Europe. But San Antonio, which is seventh largest, does not. San Jose, California; Jacksonville, Florida; and Indianapolis, Indiana also do not.
