Before invoking your own Airflow command, Meltano will invoke

airflow --help

in the expectation that it will generate the default

airflow.cfg

at a location that Meltano can then read it from, and modify it with Meltano's own Airflow setting overrides: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/blob/master/src/meltano/core/plugin/airflow.py#L47-57

For some reason, that file isn't getting created in your case

I assume you're seeing the same error with

invoke airflow version

? We have a test to verify that one works on all Pythons, so maybe we are looking at something specific to your project: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/jobs/870504800#L1230

What

pip_url

are you using for airflow?