Not quite 30minute flights but approaching there at ~40min and ~50min.
Southwest airlines for example exclusively flies a fleet of 737-type variants. Cadence for some of these flights can be over 10x daily, in each direction. The total fleet can see 4k+ flights per day.
Yes, they exist in Europe, they ban be dirt cheap, executed by companies run by penny pinchers and mostly superfluous. Going by train is in many cases faster because it gets you from city center toncity center without any airport overhead. But it also costs a multiple of a plane ticket, which should not be the case.
Yes but the cases when taking such short flights instead of trains make sense is when you commute form a small city airport to an international hub for a layover to an international flight and that saves you lots of time as you've already been through security once and you're already inside the airport fairly close to your departure gate so you can arrive pretty close time wise to your next flight as opposed to having to commute from the train station to the airport and be there ~2 hours before the flight to clear security and all.
Nobody takes the plane for 30 min to get from city center to city center, we do it because we have to catch another flight from that city's airport and it's quicker by plane.
We have railroads. The three trips listed by the previous poster all include LAX. LA is surrounded by mountains. The train from LA to SF takes ten hours. The flight is one. California has been trying to build a high speed rail to connect LA to the Bay Area for a long time now, but it's projected to cost 30 billion dollars and the timeline is ridiculous. Last I understood, the project has been shelved indefinitely.
Because the U.S. is a) much less densely populated, b) is very spread out, c) leading to very long distances between cities (which makes rail expensive), but d) very homogeneous in culture and language, so e) families and companies spread out a lot, f) which means train travel is not really practical, but also g) many of these short-haul flights are connections to/from long-haul flights and there's no way we'd take a several hour train ride to then go to an airport, to then take a long-haul flight to then do the whole thing again.
Here was one that reached almost 90k cycles in 20 years due to a lot of short flights [1]. Total flight hours were 35k, so an average flight was under 25 minutes.
Air NZ used to fly 737s between CHC and WLG. Runway to Runway flight time can be as little as 30min if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Feels weird because there is only about 5min of cruising between accent and decent.
However, demand wasn't high enough to justify non-stop round trips, they replaced the 737s with two A320 flights a day, with a bunch of ATR-72 and Dash 8 flights throughout the day.
The classic example is of course Hawaii Air Flight 243. Before the incident, that airframe accumulated 89,680 cycles in 19 years (over 35,496 flight hours) doing short hops between Hawaiian islands.
With South West I took a 737 (definitely not the MAX, probably the NG) a few times from ISP (Long Island, NY) to BWI (Baltimore / Washington). It's not 30 minutes but close enough at 40-45 minutes. These flights were within the last 2 years.
The Madrid-Barcelona "air shuttle" by Iberia has up to 26 flights a day in each direction https://www.iberia.com/es/news-updates/relaunched-the-air-sh... but they use more than one plane. Still, a lot of cycles! In the peak hours there can be a plane leaving each 15 min. You don't need to book a specific one, just a ticket for the shuttle service and then you just turn up at any time.
