We are flying through Charlotte on the way to Turks and Caicos. American has changed our flight times twice and our layover is now down to the airport minimum of 40 minutes.

Am I wrong to be concerned about this? That seems tight? I worry that if we miss our connection, it could really ruin the vacation by causing a full 24 hour delay.

Any input would be appreciated.

That's tight at any airport. As long as your incoming flight is on time, though, you should be okay. Charlotte Airport is pretty easy to navigate. It's not like you will have to take a shuttle to different terminals. It just doesn't leave you a lot of room for any delays.

The difficulty in answering a question like this is one cannot predict whether or not your inbound flight will arrive on or close to schedule. Obviously, if your flight to CLT lands on time you'll have no difficulty making the connection - you'll simply go from one gate to the next.

But you might have to contend with Murphy's Law of Airports which everyone knows means the shorter your connecting time the greater your chances are something can go wrong. Weather delays, mechanical delays, air traffic delays and even delays caused by having to wait on the tarmac because your arrival gate is occupied by another aircraft.

Now, lots of people will tell you that if you are booked on one ticket it's the airline's responsibility to get you to your destination on the next available flight. The operative words here are "next available". The next flight not might be until "tomorrow" and even then there may not be any seats "available" so there's the possibility of further delays.

The real question is "How lucky do you feel?

Personally, I'd never be comfortable with under an hour connection time for a flight and I prefer at least 90 minutes for "domestic" connections and at least 2 hours if I have to clear immigration & customs between flights.

While this is a very tight connection, you can do it if your flight is on time. I've had short connections in Charlotte, and it's not a huge airport. My main concern would be checked luggage.

However, I suspect this is a legal connection, so there may not be much you can do. For what it's worth, all the connections at Charlotte are within security, so that's good. But some of the concourses are pretty far apart. American is, unfortunately, all over the place since it inherited the USAirways gates, which were in a different concourse from the original American gates. Almost all other airlines are in Concourse A.