49. (1989) Your old college buddy from Carnegie Mellon University has called to let you know he’s recently come upon a pair of tickets to this weekend’s Steelers game against the Patriots. Wanna go?! Hmm… A quick check of the schedules shows a single airline offering two daily direct flights between your hometown airport in Melbourne, FL and Pittsburgh. Both flights make the same two stops along the way, and in terms of total travel time either one would time out about the same as if you’d made a 1.5 hour connection in Atlanta. You decide to book a seat on the early evening flight and call your buddy with the good news. Name the airline, the aircraft and the two stops. And if you’re really up for it, the score of the game.
Even though I have whiffed on my last two attempts with Continental, I think they are worth one more attempt here ... the second stop would doubtless have been at the Newark/EWR hub, with the first a short tag to someplace like Jacksonville/JAX ... I don't think the routing would support 140-some seats on a 72S, so I'll offer that the jet was a 737-200
Way to start the festivities with a most reasonable guess indeed.
Didn't Continental run a mini-hub for its Continental Lite operation out of Greensboro? In any event, that was a couple of years later. The flight we're looking for was not operated by Continental, did not operate with a 737 of any variant and - as if that weren't enough - flew along a completely different routing. Please, guess again!