Originally Posted by
jrl767
27- four candidate airlines come to mind -- American, Continental, Northwest, and United; the third stop for all would have been either Los Angeles (LAX) or San Francisco (SFO), and the equipment would have been either a DC-10 or a 747
I'm going to say right away that both AA and CO are out of the mix, as I don't recall that either had any wide-body service that would have made two stops between JFK or Newark and the west coast
Chicago (ORD) and Denver (DEN) would be the logical intermediate stops for UA, but in thinking about their schedules I seem to remember that the DEN-LAX-HNL trip was an early morning departure, making a thru flight from NYC/ORD quite unlikely
so I'm going to guess this was NW, operating JFK - Detroit (DTW) - Minneapolis (MSP) - LAX - HNL with a 747
27. That is an excellent guess as I can see Northwest possibly operating this routing with a B747-200. However, it wasn't NW, the equipment wasn't a 747 and stops were not made at Detroit or Minneapolis/St Paul.
But on the plus side of the column, the flight did depart from New York Kennedy (JFK) and the third stop was made in Los Angeles (LAX).
And I think the air carrier along with the first two stops will be a bit of a surprise.