Austin Bergstrom International Airport opened on May 23, 1999, replacing Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and becoming the first airport built under the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. It sits on the former grounds of Bergstrom Air Force Base, a Cold War military installation decommissioned in the early 1990s and returned to the City of Austin. The base had been renamed in 1943 after Captain John August Earl Bergstrom, the first native Austinite killed in World War II.

Located roughly 5 miles southeast of downtown, AUS serves the greater Austin metropolitan area as the primary gateway for one of the fastest-growing major cities in the United States. It ranks third among Texas airports by passenger volume, behind Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston Intercontinental. The airport handled over 22 million passengers in 2023, a record at the time. Southwest Airlines dominates the traffic mix, carrying roughly 38% of all AUS passengers, while Delta Air Lines has designated the airport a focus city, and American, United, and international carriers including British Airways and Lufthansa operate flights reaching London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Mexico City.

The sole passenger facility is the Barbara Jordan Terminal, named in 1999 after the Texas congresswoman and civil rights leader. The 680,000-square-foot building runs in a continuous east-to-west concourse with 34 gates. The airport's 12,250-foot primary runway, one of the longest commercial runways in the country, was inherited directly from the Air Force base, a practical reuse that shaped the airport's physical layout from the start. The terminal was designed to carry Austin's cultural identity inside its walls, with a live music stage, rotating art installations, and local restaurants, a deliberate reflection of a city long known as the Live Music Capital of the World. A multibillion-dollar expansion program, Journey With AUS, is now underway with a new concourse planned for the early 2030s.