I'm sure I've had a few tight connections in all my travels, probably missed a few. None that are notable come to mind.
My parents one time purchased ANC-LGB-LAX on JetBlue, with a 29 minute connection in Long Beach. I warned them they had to high tail it once they got to Long Beach. Luckily for them, the ANC flight was on time, and it was a case of down the stairs and directly to the gate and stairs of the connecting flight.
As alluded to plenty of times in this thread, if I did book a tight connection, it was (likely) a measured "risk". For example, I'm pretty sure I've booked lots of domestic flights with the minimum 40 minute connection (20 minutes if at a "regional" airport) between them. Most of them have been with HLO (some not) and I think I've made almost all of them, otherwise the rebooked sector has worked out.
One thing that hasn't really been mentioned (a couple of times, notably by
@Gold Member ) is that while EU 261 can protect you when you misconnect a tight connection and thus it can be a nice sport to deliberately book the so offered ones, EU 261 won't fix some problems that you may have external to your flight booking, with the most fundamental of these being a hotel booking waiting for you that you would have taken up if everything had gone to plan. Obviously, if you can be flexible with your booking and manage it accordingly, that's no problem, but it's not necessarily a given that everyone can or wants to do this (and yes, the consequence then is that you do not book tight connections). Travel insurance is rarely worth pursuing given the excess (and they may deny you on the grounds that the airline has fairly compensated you for your inconvenience).
You could get lucky - I've had a couple of hotels that I've contacted after a flight has been cancelled or delayed until the next day, and they have gracefully modified my booking at no charge and retaining the original booked rate, even if the original booking was non-refundable / non-exchangeable. Some might argue that EU 261 makes you whole by making up for your loss or penalty on your booking.
Bottom line is that tight connections can be fun, but you need to be prepared to roll with the punches. This isn't for the unseasoned traveller. That latter point alone is maybe a good reason why airlines should not be selling tight connections, and/or airports that advocate for tight connections should more or less be told to take a running jump. (HEL and hitherto AY claims it can successfully offer the quickest transit connections in all of Europe. Almost all of the largest airports in Europe have absolutely no right to claim they can do quick connections - most can't even reliably offer connections based on their posted MCTs)
But the other thing to consider is airline schedule padding.
Our recent DXB-SIN is blocked at 7hrs15. Actual was 6hrs40, and it’s been that way for the last 10 days. Our internal flights in Europe were also padded by 15 to 20 mins. SYD-MEL is now blocked at 1hr35, but rarely is the flight time more than 1hr5 mins to 1hr15.
When flights run according to schedule MCT is pretty workable. It’s really only the occasions when there are delays that it becomes an issue, or when airlines have unrealistic turn-around times.
Is it worth penalising pax on the flights that run to schedule?
Other results of padding schedules include (inadvertently, almost certainly not deliberately) allowing for delays to have less disruption overall on the schedule and improving on-time statistics and "posture" with pax, e.g. if SYD-MEL was hypothetically blocked at 1h 40m, but more often than not the flight only takes 1h 25m, the BITRE stats look fantastic and the airline gets bragging rights to say we have arrived ahead of schedule! This example is both hypothetical and exaggerated, but in my flying in the US I know that airlines are very eager and love to announce upon landing when they have arrived ahead of schedule.
Flight padding kind of shoots itself in the foot when you have, e.g. 25 minute domestic flight turnarounds.
For MEL/SYD, the difference between the flight time and the block time is spent taxiing. Not so bad during not so busy hours, but that's rare. For MEL/SYD flights, they often land or take off from the main runway (or so I think), but in my experience, BNE/SYD flights often land or take off from the third runway. It takes ages to taxi out or back from there, so that extra time in the block time is needed!
BNE/SYD and MEL/SYD have similar block times. I'm probably surprised that none of the airlines wanted to increase BNE/SYD slightly in case they had to use BNE's new runway; yeah, I know, keeping a short block time is a competitive thing...
I've done aircraft to airside NRT-HND connections, in both directions, in 80 mins a number of times.
I'm definitely not that brave, in either direction! I flew FRA-HND followed by NRT-SYD one time - two separate award redemptions. I allowed about 5 hours between the two, and IMO I would advise that's the minimum to consider
without having the seasoned experience that you have.
