CLE 41 minute connection - how safe
 

On a Sunday, my wife and I will be flying EWR-CLE-SDF with a 41 minute connect flight. My EWR flight 525 leaves EWR at 10:10 and is due into CLE at 11:39. We connect to a Continental Express 2494 due out at 12:20. It is an RJ145.

There are five later CO branded flights (two are NW codeshares) so I'd guess odds of getting to SDF that day are good. However, we have a 7 pm dinner scheduled and only two get us in on time. One is a 4:45 Continental Express RJ145 and the other is a NW flight with a CO codeshare number. If the Continental Express flight is full, what are the odds they will put me on the NW DC9-30 (CO7278)?

Now I am CO Gold flying on a saver award (20,000 miles each!) ticket. My wife has no airline status. Not sure if that makes a difference but suspect it will put us behind all paying passengers. Hope that is not so.

I could change maybe to the 6 pm flight and be safe but don't remember if it had saver award seats and am not keen on paying a change fee. If I have a shot at the 12:20 to SDF, I'll take it. But if EWR at 10:10 on Sunday is a zoo, who knows.

I am not good at finding my way around flightstats.com but it looked good to me for an on time arrival. But on time can be 15 minutes late! Also 525 today arrived at gate C05 and the SDF flight (today CO3067) left from C27. Hopefully they are close to each other.

Crystal balls aside, what do you see as my odds of making my connection? If I miss it, how good are the odds on geting on one of the next two (including the codeshare) flights?

Any advice?

If you are a healthy, able bodied adult, you can do the entirety of CLE C-concourse in 8 minutes.

Personnally I 'd worry more about delay /out/ of Newark as the primary potential troublemaker.

As a CLE regular, what dergon said.

As mentioned before, if you leave EWR on time, you shouldn't have any issues. However, the NW codeshare flights are all EWR-DTW-SDF or EWR-MSP-SDF; only CO goes direct from CLE-SDF. So if you are in CLE and miss your connection, you'd have to wait for the 4:50-6:07 CLE-SDF flight. You might still make your 7PM dinner with this option and the seat-map looks pretty open.

*Disclaimer: I know the seat map isn't 100% accurate for available seats*

Ditto that. Your biggest risks are a delay in EWR, followed by the fact that ExJet cancels flights if there is one drop of rain on the ground or one flake of snow in the air.

I was worried about a 20 minute connection in Newark to go stanby on an earlier flight, so I asked the gate agent to send an email to EWR to have one of those carts waiting and they wisked me to my gate with ease