OT - Bolivia Flight Change (AA)

not with that attitude

Took off in Detroit, picked up passengers in Toledo and Lexington, KY before switching planes in Atlanta.  It was like Greyhound, but faster.

You've obviously never (rarely) flown Southwest.  Their route map is littered with this. :)

There's actually a word for this in airline parlance: direct.  A direct flight is a flight which keeps the same filght number from origin to destination.  All nonstop flights are direct, but not all direct flights are nonstop.  For example, United Airlines runs a Hawaii-Guam service with ~5 intermediate stops (depending upon the day of the week); Alaska Airlines runs direct service from Seattle to Anchorage with 3 or 4 stops as well.

You can have a direct flight with a change of plane, which is extremely confusing; you can actually miss a connecting flight that you didn't know that you had.

Triangle routes like AA's are fairly rare; United is running a few domestically, and a few carriers run them internationally.  More common are flights like most of Singapore Airlines' US flights -- Houston - Manchester (UK) - Singapore, New York - Frankfurt - Singapore, Los Angeles - Tokyo/Seoul - Singapore, and San Francisco - Hong Kong - Singapore.  The flight stops in both cities in both directions, and in most cases the carrier obtains fifth-freedom rights, allowing them to offer service beween the two foreign destinations.  (e.g., you can buy a ticket from New York to Frankfurt on Singapore Airlines).  AA would have needed so-called eighth-freedom rights to sell seats on the domestic sector by itself.