Comments on: Connect the Dots

By: Stan Moyer

Stan Moyer — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:13:22 +0000

I worked for TWA for 38 years till they went bust and sold out to AA. In the mid sixties I worked in Operational Control and one slow night we found the longest (most stops) in the OAL, it Was a North Central with 15 stops. A couple of my buddies and I were going to ride it from start to finish, but never pulled it off. It would have been fun until we got bumped in some really off beat city.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 23:12:24 +0000

Some of the old BOAC routes were quite something.

In the early 1950s there was a weekly flight from London to Tokyo by way of Zurich, Rome, Cairo, Basra, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok and Hong Kong. This was originally operated by Argonauts (a Canadian version of the DC-4) and took a mind-bending 86 hours and 35 minutes.

In August 1953, BOAC put the Comet-1 on same the route and slashed the time to *just* 36 hours. No wonder everyone thought the Comet was going to change the world.

By: Jocelyn M

Jocelyn M — Sat, 09 May 2020 14:42:44 +0000

Thank you for the link to the book! I’m a map freak who turns on the “in flight map” and turns to the route map in the magazine. (After I do the puzzles, of course!) And yes! “Through flights!” I remember those, too!

Fingers crossed for a “good landing” for the airlines post-Covid, whenever that might be.

By: Paulo de Tarso

Paulo de Tarso — Sat, 09 May 2020 13:47:30 +0000

I love flights with multiple stops. I still remember going from Salvador to Belo Horizonte on such a flight back in 2001. First we took a Transbrasil 737 that stopped in Rio and then in São Paulo, where we changed into a turboprop Brasília that flew to Campinas, Bauru and, finally, Belo Horizonte. It was a lot of fun to me.

By: Sheila Hartney

Sheila Hartney — Fri, 08 May 2020 19:43:07 +0000

Being ticketed to Milwaukee but deplaning in ORD was a type of ticketing known as “point beyond”. If the fare was cheaper to the further city, even if the plane itself did not go there, it was legal to write the ticket that way, to the point beyond. And you were never booked to that more distant city.

I was a ticket agent at DCA for a number of years, and it was always a lot of fun to find those routings for passengers. It was important that the published fare to the point beyond city actually include the city you’d be deplaning at as part of its route map. If I only had the Rules Tariff from then in front of us I could point out examples.

Most of the routings that gave a good point beyond fare were logical, but not always.

By: Nick Alexander

Nick Alexander — Fri, 08 May 2020 16:18:08 +0000

Back in 1984 I had a travel agent book me ORD to DTW for Christmas with family followed by DTW to SFO visiting a friend and then back to Chicago. Boarded a British Airways 747 Chicago to London but got off in Detroit. On the trip back from SFO I was ticketed to Milwaukee as it was cheaper but got off the plane at ORD. Not sure how she came up with it but it did work for me.

By: james

james — Fri, 08 May 2020 15:36:22 +0000

Even flights with a single stopover can sometimes be challenging…..On a business trip from Santiago to Mexico City some years back, I was flying what was then LAN Airlines.

The flight included one scheduled stopover in Lima, Peru—-but Lima was fogged in completely, so the plane diverted to a military airport somewhere away from the fog. The fog did not lift for about 30 hours. Since the military base had no accommodations for deplaning and waiting, all passengers had to remain on board overnight. The food ran out and the toilets (well, you can imagine), and we were asked not to leave our seats until we landed as originally planned. I had no access to a phone (this was pre cell phone) so I could not call my next appointment in Mexico City to let them know I would not be arriving as scheduled. I have been traveling internationally for 40 years, and I have managed to find ways to sleep in the waiting areas of more airports than most people know exist, but this was perhaps the least comfortable trip in my career.

By: Michael J Saporito

Michael J Saporito — Fri, 08 May 2020 15:26:24 +0000

Hope you are doing well Patrick – flying at all? In my hundreds of flights I only had one “direct” ever – that was a TWA 727 – around 1896 – BOS-JFK-NAS – and it was the same routing coming home…
Be well.
M
ps- aviation photography is not what it was…cargo has been about it…5 767s and an A300 last night in about 75 minutes…after that – an A320 looks like a jumbo compared to everything else.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:33:50 +0000

In reply to Brian. LIAT. Leeward Islands Air Transport. Yes. They had been around forever, but have since departed, so to speak.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:31:38 +0000

I remember some of those puddle-hopping flights. Probably my best one was Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo-Guayaquil-Quito-San Jose on Lacsa(code-sharing with VARIG) — 14 hours on an Airbus 320. Another was Barbados-St Lucia-Dominica-Antigua on LIAT (final leg in the jump seat)