I'll concur on the contractor issue. Should DL be contracting with some of these entities? Probably not, but it's hard for DL to control all of them. Keep in mind that at many smaller outstations, contractors will be working for more than one airline. I know during DL's failed pre-merger foray into FAR, they used the same contractors that UA does. In fact, you usually walked up to the DL counter, were ignored, then finally an NW employee would try to get a contractor over from the UA counter to help. This generally failed, because the contractors knew UA's system fairly well but had few clues about DL's system.