Fly from NY to South Africa, stopover in London??

Hi,
I am going to live in Johannesburg for 6 months or so, and as I was looking at flights I noticed that many of them from New York have a connection in London. I have friends I'd like to visit in London, so I'm wondering how to do a stopover of a few days (rather than a four hour connection at the airport) in London, on the same flight. Does anyone know which airlines allow this and how to go about it?
Thanks,
Lia

usually any airline will allow you to stop over in a city if the flight changes there, and it usually doesn't cost any extra. If you're booking on a website that doesn't accommodate that option you might just have to book through a travel agent and speak to a real person or use a better website that allows you to enter multi stop flights.

We have done this before and it works very well, even with a few weeks in between - my son did that a while ago.

It's certainly a good idea, but to keep total costs down you'd probably need to do the NY-London leg with the same airline as the London-Jozi one, which wuld probably mean BA or maybe Virgin ( think the do SA now). Still, Virgin in particular is one of the better airlines around.

Thanks!
What airline is "BA?"

Also, on Virgin's website (and other airline's website) it doesn't show an option for stopovers. It just automatically lists the layover. How do I specify that I want a stopover and not a layover?

Hi,
BA is British Airways.
Is there not a direct flight from Atlanta to SA???