Originally Posted by
ITA Hacker
It turns out there are a lot of very out-of-the-way places in the world that you can get to by airplane, and for many such points A and B you need more than three flight segments to do so.
A couple of examples pulled from our current flight schedule database:
1. To fly between Tenerife, Canary Islands (TFN) and Canberra, Australia (CBR) requires a minimum of four flight segments.
2. Of all places with passenger service, the points that require the most flights to fly between are Playon Chico, Panama (PYC) and Aniwa, Vanuatu (AWD). These two points require a minimum of 10 flight segments to fly between. Even our software with the default settings is unfortunately unable to piece this one together. Since many of the required flights do not depart every day, it requires over 11 days to do it!
Originally Posted by
Efrem
Absolutely correct. Any two places that are not international gateways in their countries take at least one segment each to reach such a gateway. The entire set of international gateways in the world is not connected by nonstop (or even direct) flights; there are many gateway pairs that require at least two flights from gateway to gateway. Q.E.D.
(Local example involving two places I've been recently: Martha's Vineyard, MYY, to Punta Arenas, Chile, PUQ.)
In these cases, though, I would assume the GDS would return the most direct routing without needing to specify any connection points, even if it involved more than two connections.
I, on the other hand, was looking to specifically force more than two connections to construct a mileage run from ANC to DCA via PDX, SEA, and LAX. I ended up having to do two separate searches (ANC-PDX-SEA-LAX and LAX-DCA) to find flights with available space. I was simply looking for a way to get this information without having to run two separate searches.
In fact, I think I finally just gave up doing that and just searched for availability on ITA.