What is the shortest commercially-available passenger flight? Exclude stuff like chartered flights, where you have to make special arrangements. Also, I want to keep the focus on transportation, so exclude stuff like sight-seeing flights, or flights for the purposes of skydiving, that sort of thing.
Two categories:
Over water (you couldn’t drive yourself there).
Over land
For the first, I note that Cape Air has a flight from Hyannis to Nantucket, with a scheduled duration of 22 minutes.
For the second, I note that Cape Air also has a flight from Boston to Hyannis, with a scheduled duration of 35 minutes.
(And no, I’m not a shill for Cape Air, I was just on the Cape over this past weekend and found myself interested in the concept of really short flights.)
Can you beat those, or have I answered my own question?
It’s only about 7 miles as the crow flies from Oakland Airport to San Francisco Airport, but for some odd reason all the flights I’m finding list a travel time of 3-5 hours. Maybe they use actual crows…
There are daily flights from Fort Wayne,IN to Chicago and Detroit which take 45 minutes and 35 minutes respectively,including taxiing and getting to the gates. You spend more time getting to the airport and later to your destination than you do in flight.
There used to be a flight from Fort Wayne to Dayton,OH (25-30 minutes total) but it was dropped due to a lack of passengers.
You can fly United Express from John Wayne (SNA) to LAX maybe 40 miles or so.
United also used to have a flight that went down the Central Valley of California. Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, then on to LAX Stockton to Modesto is about 40 miles, Modesto to Merced is maybe 50 miles.
Vieques Air Link offers flights between Ceiba, Puerto Rico (RVR) and Vieques, Puerto Rico (VQS) that seem to be only ten minutes long. Ceiba is on the main island of PR and Vieques is one of the smaller islands, so you can’t walk there (there is a ferry though).
In the US, after the 1977 Pan Am Building accident, these were pretty much stopped. Government helicopters can land on midtown rooftops; but private aviation has to land at either ground pads or specially designed heliports.
Their shortest flight is New Bedford to Martha’s Vineyard and vice-versa. It’s listed as a 12 minute flight, but it is routinely about an 8 minute flight.