What commercial flight route has the biggest number of stops/layovers?

I did a six-flight trip once (one overnight stay involved due to final flight being on an EAS leg), with 56 hours, I think, of traveling. Could have pushed it to 7 if I hadn't already been at the one international airport in the origin country, and I could have cut the EAS leg out if my family had driven 2 to 4 hours each way to be able to get me at a larger airport. Friend of mine did a trip that required, I think, 9 flights once. (from somewhere in the Alaskan bush to BDO)

I think anytime I have to flight with multiple flights over 4 hours is brutal. I've done ATL-DXB direct flights with a flight on both sides of that, and I've done ORD-DXB with a stop at LHR or FRA with an additional flight on both sides. I'd much rather have one 15 hour flight than two eight hours. On the 15 hour you can sleep some, maybe get a little ahead of jetlag if your timing lines up well. On the eight hour, you just get abbreviated naps, no sleep cycle, and you might think, oh, but you can get out and stretch your legs, usually what ends up happening is you get stuck going through customs somewhere and stand in line forever, then cram yourself into another plane. Give me one flight.

I once flew from Hawaii to the middle of Russia, booked last moment due to an emergency.

5 different flights to get there, 4 to return.

45 hours to get there, 36 hours to get back.

Crying babies next to me on 3 of the flights.

Worst flying experience ever.

As alluded to in the stack overflow comments, Carl de Marcken (ITA Chief Scientist) wrote some code to determine the longest possible shortest path between two airports with scheduled flights. At that time (circa 2000) the answer was Wasu, New Guinea to Peawanuck, Ontario. The best you could do was something like 48 hours and involved a very large number of flights. On a bad day the best you could do was over 90 hours.

Maybe somebody at Google could run the lisp function that computes that on current data and post the answer.

The United Island Hopper famously has 6 stops throughout the Pacific between Honolulu and Guam visiting 7 different islands.

(http://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-united-island-hopper-sev...)

HNL > MA > KWA > KSA > PNI > TKK > GUM

Typically a single flight number can only accommodate 4 legs/segment one way as this is a limitation in most GDS systems. Of course a ticket buyer can combine flights to create more legs if necessary but airlines don't schedule more than 4. 4 leg flights are not common however. A leg/segment is defined as a takeoff and landing. So a 4 leg flight would be A to B to C to D one way.

The longest flight I did was when I returned from a visit to New Zealand in 2004:

Invercargill -> Christchurch -> Auckland -> Los Angeles -> London LHR -> Edinburgh

The journey took around 36 hours and was largely uneventful. What I did learn was to check your baggage weight allowances; I ended up wearing quite a few of my clothes on the Invercargill to Christchurch leg :)

You can compare these with some early 20th century routes from London to Australia, which had dozens of stops:

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/iaw35aus/ia... https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--M9zDODc...

These answers are ridiculously low.

In Northern Canada, flights are chained. This means that to go from Old Crow (YOC) to Whitehorse (YXY), you need to do:

1. Old Crow (YOC) -> Inuvik

2. Inuvik -> Dawson City

3. Dawson City -> Whitehorse

Even getting to NY from there adds another two stops:

4. Whitehorse -> Vancouver

5. Vancouver -> Newark

Supposing you wanted to go to the Galapagos, the shortest trip from Yellowknife happens to go through Newark/New York City (yes, you'd need to change airports):

6. New York City -> Guayaquil

7. Guayaquil -> San Cristóbal Island

But you could probably find better results if you looked to leave the western hemisphere and go somewhere like VOG (7 segments total), UTN (8 segments total), or TMR (8 segments total).

Don't have to be particularly obscure cities to get a lot of segments. I once had to take a last minute flight from Cape Town to Seattle (before the direct Jo-burg to Atlanta route existed).

Cape Town > Johannesburg > Amsterdam > Atlanta > Seattle.

4 segments... and about 40 hours... gooooooood times :)

My longest travel was MIA-DOH-BKK-Chang Mai 33 hours of travel due to layovers etc. MIA-DOH was fairly pleasant on the qatar a380.

Brain Teaser, try to fly to FYN (CN) and back.

But regarding your question. I once flew NYC<>Asunción. I don't remember the stops anymore but it was at least three, including El Salvador and Lima.