Originally Posted by
WHBM
The ABC guide, the rest of the world equivalent of OAG, used M, for multi-stop, for the same.
I think I can recall seeing a Northwest 727 through flight from Seattle to Miami which was one such, and took all day. It went through all the traditional Northwest minor points in the northern tier to Minneapolis, then on through their other stops down to Florida. Flights like this in the USA were generally given the same number throughout more for operational convenience through major hubs, and for handling overlapping intermediate journeys, rather than end-to-end trips. There were also a few in Africa etc.
Back in the 1950s a major carrier flight from say London to Tokyo might also make more than 9 stops, but this was in the times before the OAG/ABC alphabetical format, when schedules were shown in traditional "Railroad Timetable" format for each airline.
First of all, apologies for not acknowledging your response. I don't think I ever got a notification of it, since I look at those just short of religiously.
I see from the later post that there certainly was a SEA-DCA flight with 11 stops, but I don't recall every seeing it listed. I used to go through the itineraries section to pick out the long flights, just looking for that #, but I don't remember seeing that one (which doesn't mean it wasn't there, of course -- it could also be that they didn't market that one end to end, just as you wouldn't have found UA's SFO-RNO-EKO-ELY-SLC-DEN flight if you looked at SFO-DEN). The one I was thinking of actually flew between Havre St Pierre and Blanc Sablon, in Quebec (again, I might have the direction backward). All the airports are still served, but not in one long round-robin trip.